International Captioning Report
Executive Summary
The global marketplace for video has grown tremendously in recent years, and television broadcasters in particular are constantly searching for ways to distribute their programming internationally. Media and culture from the United States are indisputably dominating the world market for information. More than 80 million people worldwide watch CNN's English-language news service; MTV's services in Europe, Asia and South America are extremely popular; and Heartland, a service which would proliferate public television productions worldwide, has recently been launched. Thanks to these and other efforts on the part of broadcasters, viewers in all countries have become accustomed to watching programming produced elsewhere. However, broadcasters still face the challenge of adapting a program for the many languages and markets it must serve.
While at least five incompatible technologies exist worldwide to broadcast captions or subtitles , two in particular dominate most of what is captioned or subtitled- line-21 and World System Teletext. Captions and subtitles created using these technologies have a different appearance, use different amounts of bandwidth in the vertical blanking interval, and require different consumer and professional hardware to create, encode and decode. Line-21 captioning, used in North America, is the most prevalent technology and is used on more than 200 hours of TV programming weekly. In addition, new capabilities like Extended Data Service (XDS) have captured the imagination of the world's consumer electronics manufacturers, eager to exploit the capabilities of a new generation of smarter TVs. The timing couldn't be better for developing an international data protocol and a standard method of creating and transmitting these language and other VBI data services.
The ability to record a program off-air or rent a video with embedded and recoverable closed captions or subtitles certainly ranks high on a viewer's list of the essential qualities in a captioning or subtitling system. And in markets like Asia, Europe and North America where VCR penetration is high, a home- recordable system is a must. However, the speed at which data are transmitted in the line-21 system is relatively slow (approximately 60 characters per second), thus limiting the amount and kind of information which can be transmitted. Teletext subtitles, on the other hand, are delivered using a much faster system (approximately 12 kilobytes per second). This speed allows for the transmission of more data, yet makes it very difficult for the viewer to record a program off-air with the data intact. It also makes renting or purchasing a closed-subtitled video for home use impossible.
The technology employed in the United States and abroad to make television accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers shows great promise for building additional bridges among people who speak different languages. In markets like Latin America, dual-language subtitling can make a program simultaneously accessible in both Spanish and Portuguese. In Asia, where a satellite feed often serves a vast audience which speaks several languages and is eager to learn English, a multi-lingual broadcast can help reach millions of additional viewers. Most importantly, as international broadcasters like CNN and MTV seek to supply a single, basic program service for markets which speak different languages, multi-lingual broadcasts offer a practical and logical solution.
Any discussion of international data exchange must also include the issue of language translation. Currently, what little caption-data exchange there is primarily occurs between countries speaking the same language. For the most part, any data exchanged between countries with language differences must undergo a manual translation process which is not usually cost- or time-effective, thereby negating the benefits of the exchange. The current state of automated- translation computer technology does not appear to be advanced enough to provide a solution, but with its eventual development would come easier exchange of caption data between countries with language differences.
In this study, the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) surveyed the state of captioning, subtitling and data exchange around the world. It is clear that there is great interest and tremendous potential in this field. However, there is very little information exchange and coordination between program providers, distributors, caption agencies, and hardware and software manufacturers. Past efforts to create data-exchange standards or to use caption data for language access have been program-specific, limited in scope or application and/or proprietary in nature. The opportunity exists to create an international data-exchange protocol and to influence a move by broadcasters, service providers and equipment manufacturers to an accepted world standard. Just as NCAM, the captioning industry and TV manufacturers are working to shape the services of the North American Advanced Television (ATV) standard, there must be a move to create worldwide data and consumer hardware standards. CPB and PBS can take a leadership role in helping to make this happen.
Based on its findings, NCAM offers several short- and long-term recommendations which will, it is hoped, enable total access to television programming for international deaf and hard-of-hearing communities while creating a body of programming with multiple-language streams that truly reaches everyone.
