International Captioning Project
Europe
| Country | Standard | TV households | Cable | VCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | PAL | 3,000,000 | 55% | 48% |
| Belgium | PAL | 4,000,000 | 95% | 59% |
| Czech Republic | PAL | 4,000,000 | 45% | N/A |
| Denmark | PAL | 2,000,000 | 53% | 53% |
| Finland | PAL | 3,000,000 | 42% | 55% |
| France | SECAM | 21,000,000 | 8% | 58% |
| Germany | PAL | 31,000,000 | 42% | 60% |
| Hungary | SECAM | 34,000,000 | 27% | 34% |
| Iceland | PAL | 80,000 | 1% | 66% |
| Ireland | PAL | 1,000,000 | 47% | 63% |
| Italy | PAL | 20,000,000 | N/A | 69% |
| The Netherlands | PAL | 6,000,000 | 86% | 57% |
| Norway | PAL | 2,000,000 | 44% | 60% |
| Poland | PAL | 12,000,000 | 1% | 45% |
| Portugal | PAL | 3,000,000 | N/A | 42% |
| Russia | SECAM | N/A | 95% | 5% |
| Slovakia | SECAM | 5,000,000 | 6% | 20% |
| Spain | PAL | 11,000,000 | 5% | 54% |
| Sweden | PAL | 4,000,000 | 53% | 66% |
| Switzerland | PAL | 3,000,000 | 85% | 65% |
| United Kingdom | PAL | 22,000,000 | 4% | 75% |
Amount of Subtitling
| Country | Hrs subtitled | Teletext sets | Country | Hrs subtitled | Teletext sets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | 21 | 900,000 | Israel | 13 | 100,000 |
| Belgium | 9 | 425,000 | Italy | 20 | 500,000 |
| Croatia | N/A | 250,000 | Netherlands | 15 | 3,000,000 |
| Denmark | 36 | 1,200,000 | Norway | 10 | 750,000 |
| Finland | 10 | 500,000 | Slovenia | N/A | 150,000 |
| France | 20 | 1,000,000 | Spain | 2 | 1,800,000 |
| Germany | 11 | 9,000,000 | Sweden | 10 | N/A |
| Hungary | N/A | 350,000 | Switzerland | 12 | 1,000,000 |
| Iceland | N/A | 13,500 | Turkey | N/A | 350,000 |
| Ireland | N/A | 250,000 | United Kingdom | 125 | 9,000,000 |
Some European countries (Austria, England, the Netherlands and Switzerland) provide limited live subtitling, but on the whole there is much less than in the United States. Some programming is made accessible using Velotype stenography. Velotype captions are created using a syllabic "chord" keyboard, permitting a typing speed of only about 100 words per minute. By nature, programs subtitled using Velotype technology usually have subtitles which have been heavily edited or summarized. Countries using Velotype to provide live captions include France, Sweden, Norway and Germany. Other countries are now beginning to use stenographic real-time subtitling: in the United Kingdom, the BBC now uses stenographic technology for real-time subtitling, and in the Netherlands, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation is beginning to use stenography for their live broadcasts.
There are several hundred teletext and subtitling agencies in the world, mostly concentrated in the European community and Australia. Unlike the United States, nearly all public broadcast television stations operate their own subtitling units, which create subtitles for their own programs. In addition, there are independent subtitling agencies which provide subtitles for the commercial and corporate/industrial markets.
While there is not as much subtitling in Europe, Australia and other teletext nations as there is captioning in North America, steps are being taken to increase accessibility in the future. In the United Kingdom, for example, a law was passed requiring that commercial broadcasters subtitle at least 50% of their own output by 1998. (Although not required to by law, the BBC will also conform to this standard.) Scandinavian countries exceeded this level for programs which they produce (as opposed to programs which they import) several years ago. Agencies in other countriesÑ among them, France, the Netherlands and SwitzerlandÑ receive extra funds from the government which are earmarked specifically for subtitling. However, there are rarely subtitles on imported or acquired programs.
As discussed earlier in this report, teletext subtitles are not easily recorded, thus making it impossible for deaf and hard-of-hearing people to rent closed-subtitled movies. One American captioning agency, NCI, has attempted to solve this problem by making line 21-style captions available in England on selected home movies. Some video stores now carry movies with NCI-created captions encoded on line 22 of the PAL VBI; these captions are visible only when the video is viewed through a special decoder, the VideoCaption Readerª, which sells for approximately £100 (about $150). These captions differ slightly from their line-21 counterparts in that they follow British subtitle standards, including the use of mixed-case text and British spelling conventions. The caption files themselves are created by NCI in the United States and transferred to England for encoding.
NCI's effort to proliferate line-21 style captioning in England has not met with great success. Part of the problem may lie in the fact that England already has a successful subtitling standard in placeÑ this being teletextÑ and television sets are readily available with built-in teletext decoders. Thus, trying to introduce another standard has been difficult, even if it does allow the viewer to watch pre-recorded subtitles. Additionally, relatively few movies are available with these pre-recorded subtitles, making the cost of the extra decoder difficult to justify.
Data Exchange
In addition to participating in data exchange experiments with the United States, the problem of data exchange within Europe itself has, at least in theory, been solved by the creation of a standard format for the exchange of subtitles. This format is known as the European Broadcast Union (EBU) standard. The number of countries actually exchanging subtitle files is currently small, mainly because of the multitude of language and cultural differences which abound in Europe. However, some countries are studying ways to solve this problem, among them Norway, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Belgium. The BBC regularly exchanges subtitle files with the Australian Caption Centre. In addition, most subtitling systems used in EBU countries are capable of creating EBU standard files. Some software is also capable of converting non-standard files to conform to the new standard format.
