Netflix Closed-Captioning Settlement Goes Beyond New FCC Rules
A federal judge approved a settlement between Netflix and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) that calls for Netflix to provide closed captions on all its streaming content within two years, court filings show. Judge Michael Posner granted the parties’ motion to approve their consent judgment Thursday in U.S. District Court, Springfield, Mass.
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Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt said in a press release last week that the company hopes the agreement will be a benchmark for other streaming entertainment providers. The agreement also requires Netflix to pay $755,000 in attorney fees and another $400,000 to assist NAD with monitoring compliance (http://xrl.us/bntu5t). The agreement is a model for the streaming entertainment industry, said Arlene Mayerson, directing attorney for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. “DREDF hopes that this is the beginning of opening the Internet for deaf and hard of hearing individuals in streamed entertainment, education, government benefits and more.”
The agreement goes beyond FCC rules that took effect Sept. 30, and were a result of the 21st-Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, requiring closed captions for IP video of programming that has been shown on TV or added to an online distributors’ inventory on or after Sept. 30, 2012, that hasn’t been substantially edited for the Internet. The FCC rules exempt programming that’s never been exhibited on TV with captions before. And with Netflix and other online distributors beginning to create original, exclusive programming, the deaf and hard of hearing community had been concerned that such content may have never been captioned, said Blake Reid, a staff attorney at the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University, which represents the group Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
"This settlement is a very big deal on that front because it means everything that shows up on Netflix, no matter where it came on or whether it showed up on TV before, will get covered,” Reid said. Additionally, the settlement is an example of one of the biggest online video distributors essentially saying, “This isn’t worth fighting about,” Reid said. That will hopefully spur other distributors to take a more holistic approach to online video captioning than what was spelled out in the FCC rules, he said.
Advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing are beginning to monitor how distributors are complying with the new FCC rules, Reid said. “It’s too early to tell whether we're going to see problems or widespread compliance,” he said. A bigger test will come in March, when live and near-live content will be required to be captioned as well, he said.