Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television

5. Public Interest, Market Failure, and Captioning Regulation

Chapter 5 Public Interest, Market Failure, and Captioning Regulation Closed-captioned television just might be the most underrated technology of the past decade. Article in The Reading Teacher, 1991 In January 1986, The Cosby Show—a half-hour, family-oriented sitcom featuring comedian Bill Cosby and a talented cast of fellow African American actors—had captured the imagination of audiences to become NBC’s highest-rated program. It was also a financial windfall for the previously last-place network. When this prime-time staple was first closed-captioned at the start of its 1985–1986 season, it was raking in advertising revenues of $1.5 million per week; the captioning labor cost of $1,250 per week was a trivial expense by comparison. Nevertheless , NBC refused to pay for this cost, arguing that its only responsibility to its viewers was to pay for “encoding the signal that the network transmits over the air,” at roughly $500 per episode. Instead, NBC said, Casey-Werner Productions and part-owner Bill Cosby should foot the captioning bill, as NBC already paid them $500,000 per episode for the right to screen the show each week. Besides, the production company stood to reap a syndication price of $1 million per episode when the series entered reruns. In the end, Cosby retained its captions, but its producers paid for only half the cost. The rest of the bill was picked up by the captioning agency, the WGBH Caption Center—a nonprofit, publicly funded, PBS affiliate.1 This was not the first time NBC had balked at paying captioning costs. Just two years after closed captioning had begun, in February 1982, NBC Vice Chairman Irwin Segelstein sent a letter to the National Captioning Institute (NCI) president John Ball informing him that, because of disappointing decoder sales, the network had decided “to withdraw from the project,” saving some $520,000 per year.2 A hastily prepared counterproposal by Ball, as well as the fact that “200 people from two schools for the deaf picketed outside the New York headquarters of NBC’s parent company, RCA,” led NBC to postpone its decision .3 But by the start of the 1982–1983 season in August, the network—“in last place in the ratings and cutting costs across the board”—announced it was indeed abandoning NCI.4 In a congressional hearing a year later, an NBC executive explained that his network ’s participation “was expressly conditioned on the representation that the hearing impaired public would obtain at least 100,000 decoders . . . a year,” but “today, almost 4 years after the project commenced , we understand that there are fewer than 75,000 decoders—or less than 20 percent of expected demand.” As a result, NBC remained “skeptical . . . of the extent of interest by the hearing impaired in closed captioning.”5 Yet even as the network pleaded poverty, it was pushing forward with another Line 21 innovation that brought text to television screens in a different way. In spring of 1983 “NBC became the first broadcast network to produce and transmit for demonstration purposes a full high-resolution teletext service,” some eighty “pages” (screens) of text and graphic information delivered over the TV, containing magazine-like sections for news, weather, sports, money, people , “your body,” “living,” horoscope, kids, travel, movie reviews, and soap opera reports. Unfortunately, because no affordable decoders for this teletext service were available for purchase, “the viewership for teletext on the networks was virtually nil.”6 As the NBC saga illustrates, even with NCI’s new ability to realtimecaption news programs—as well as other popular live events, such as sports—the chicken-and-egg problem in closed captioning persisted. From the networks’ point of view, not enough deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HOH) households were purchasing caption decoders; from the D/HOH point of view, not enough programming was captioned to justify such an expensive purchase. The networks bristled at the suggestion that the government might mandate the captioning of all television content, however. ABC argued such regulation was “unnecessary in light of the success of the voluntary approach,” and CBS said that “mandatory captioning would infringe upon First Amendment rights of broadcasters and producers, placing an economic burden upon them that often would not be justified.”7 Yet, at the same time, the networks were more than willing to invest in risky information-technology ventures, 200 Convergence in the Industry like...