I don't own a TIVO or a DVR so I'm often relegated to watching my shows on the Internet or on DVDs. I'm a sucker for a couple of television shows - namely Lost, House, Law & Order and Heroes.
You know what pisses me off lately? With all of the advent in technology, I would expect to find all of the television programs and movies I like captioned. Guess what? That's not the case, but you already expected that, didn't you?
I love to watch television shows of parent networks such as ABC and NBC. Many of them are already captioned. I even watch shows from Hulu, and Hulu captions nearly 70% of the shows on their site.
You know which site does not caption their online movies? Netflix.
Yes. The world's biggest online movie ordering service does not caption their online service.
It's been going around in the blogging community that the Netflix Chief Product Officer (gee-they have a position called that?) wrote a blog on the Netflix site on June 12 explaining, among other things, that, '...The majority of viewers would object to English captions on English content, so we have to figure out how to let individual viewers turn them on and off." Excuse my English, but what kind of dumb response is that from the Netflix CPO?
Not only that, Netflix's production company, Red Envelope Entertainment - which has apparently just closed - does not caption any of the independent films they purchase and mass-produce. Two years ago, my ex-wife and I tried to watch Sherrybaby, which we rented from Netflix, only to get it and discover there were no captions or subtitles available. What the....?
Neil Hunt, Netflix's CPO, says that this isn't something that can be quickly addressed. He said in the blog post 'captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away."
Hunt also claims that in order to process the text files for each movie, especially the ones they provide through Silverlight - their online viewing service - it will take 500 processor months to make one encode.
I don't buy it. Neither do other deaf web programmers that I know.
If Hulu and other online movie and television services can provide text for the captions, why can't Netflix? They've long been neglecting the Deaf and Hard-of- Hearing Community's requests - and to some degree, actually not caring.
The battle isn't ending here. Marlee Matlin led a protest of sorts on her Twitter account (@MarleeMatlin) to bring attention to the folks at Netflix that we want this to happen sooner.
Jamie Berke also blogged the day after the post by Hunt. Berke wrote 'If the Deaf Community is upset now, just wait until a year from now if Netflix doesn't keep its announced commitment." Exactly.
Berke also recommends something else: legislation to mandate captions on the Internet.
This is something I agree with. We need this.
© Copyrighted material, used by permission. This article can not be copied, reproduced, or redistributed without the express written consent of the author.
