The New Hampshire Association of Broadcasters along with 44 other State Broadcasters Associations joined in filing Reply Comments in the FCC’s rule making proceeding to implement certain provisions of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 that would require television stations to caption television programming disseminated over the Internet.  Because the NPRM raised the specter of a wide range of new regulations on television stations, the Associations sought to reduce those  burdens and regulatory risks in several ways.  First, we urged the FCC to adopt the SMPTE-TT, which was recommendated and the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee and supported by the NAB, as the industry standard for the interchange format for receiving and passing through closed captioning.  We pointed out that SMPTE-TT would provide television stations and other parties in the distribution chain with needed certainty which, in turn, would save time and money during the online captioning process.  In line with the NAB, we also asked the Commission to allow SMPTE-TT to serve as a safe harbor for the FCC’s Internet captioning requirements.  Second, we urged the FCC to limit its captioning requirements to “full-length programmings” with the effect that the new requirements would not apply to excerpts or clips of full-length programs, such as individual segments of a local news program streamed online.  Third, we urged the FCC to extend by an additional six months the lead times when the new regulations would become effective, reasoning that without such an extension stations may be forced to reduce or eliminate online postings of live, near-live, and prerecorded, unedited programming until their captioning resources and other capabilities are fully developed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 7:56 am and is filed under FCC news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.