Closed captions on TV endangered, says a group that would care

[Bob Jersey]

The National Court Reporters Association, which ostensibly includes folks whose work involves captioning, griped to the Society of Broadcast Engineers about the decreasing availability of old-school phone lines through which they've historically delivered the data... the digital successors don't cut it, apparently...

Columnist Phil Kurz, TVNewsCheck (link)

Ellwanger, you agree with this?

B

[Jim Ellwanger]

Bob Jersey wrote:

> Ellwanger, you agree with this?

Sounds about right, although I haven't been involved with live closed
captioning in over a decade and a half.

Back then, we were using USRobotics 14.4k modems to connect to the network
servers, although the actual connection happened at 1200 baud (closed
captioning is much slower than that -- I think 60 characters per second is
the maximum).

The company I worked for had two sets of outgoing lines, one through some
alternative long-distance company whose name I forget, and the backup via
Sprint long-distance. Sprint had "free Fridays" for business customers for
a time, and so we had a written procedure for someone to flip the switch
in the control rooms at midnight Friday, and again 24 hours later.

All this said... I'm sure they'll get something worked out. I'd argue
that networks awarding their captioning contracts to the lowest bidder is
a bigger issue for caption quality than the supposed dearth of POTS lines.


--
Jim Ellwanger <trai...@ellwanger.tv>
<http://www.ellwanger.tv>

[Jon Delfin]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Jim Ellwanger <trai...@ellwanger.tv> wrote:

[snip]

All this said... I'm sure they'll get something worked out.  I'd argue
that networks awarding their captioning contracts to the lowest bidder is
a bigger issue for caption quality than the supposed dearth of POTS lines.

 

Absofreakin'lutely. Add to that the total lack of pride-of-work by the suppliers, and you've got the mess we're in.

[PGage]

As someone who is starting to experience some hearing loss, and benefits from CC, I agree with all of this. But I wonder why? I have seen the Deaf Community be extremely well organized, and very vocal and effective, on a number of issues - have they not focused in on CC?

 

[Jim Ellwanger]

> On Mar 6, 2015, at 4:04 PM, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have seen the Deaf Community be extremely well organized, and very vocal and effective, on a number of issues - have they not focused in on CC?

I think, even after all these years, they're still in the mode of "we're just glad to have the captions."

[Doug Eastick]

I can't read the original release at this time,  but I am baffled that an organization still relies on analog voice and modems for just about anything.

Would have thought that someone in the last 15 years might have said "maybe we should go to a digital tcp/ip platform".

[Paul Murray]

On Friday, March 6, 2015 at 11:25:47 PM UTC-5, Doug Eastick wrote:

I can't read the original release at this time,  but I am baffled that an organization still relies on analog voice and modems for just about anything.

Would have thought that someone in the last 15 years might have said "maybe we should go to a digital tcp/ip platform".

They have. My friend who does CC had to buy new software within the past year or two to transmit her captions over the net. She says it seems to work great. She's never mentioned them having any problems at the receiving end.

So, based on the smallest possible sample size, I'm not sure how correct the premise of this article is.

[Doug Eastick]

I read the full release.   It's intent is to kick the old slow stations that didn't update their technology to  the new IP service.

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