History of Closed Captioning
Updated February 26, 2010.
Getting this legislation passed was not quite a cakewalk, but close. There was opposition from a certain professional association. I got ahold of a copy of the actual Capitol Hill testimony by a representative of this association. A friend and I drafted a letter blasting this representative's testimony and faxed it to the association. Next thing we knew, the representative was no longer working for that association.
Televisions containing the mandatory circuitry went on sale in 1993, and not a moment too soon - only about 400,000 decoders total had been sold by 1992. This increase in caption-decoding televisions was still not enough to generate a huge increase in captioning availability. One reason was because captioning was still a voluntary activity, which often caused broadcasters to view it as something charitable which should be paid for by outside sources instead of simply treating it as another cost of business. In response, Congress in 1996 passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which mandated closed captioning on television. This act has helped to spur rapid growth in the closed captioning industry. While not everything on television is captioned, we have come a long way from the first 15 hours a week of captioned programming in 1980.
The captioning industry's growth is reflected in the website I started in 1995, Closed Captioning Web. While initially an all-purpose website, it has become primarily a resource for finding captioning services, and for finding jobs in the captioning industry.
Getting this legislation passed was not quite a cakewalk, but close. There was opposition from a certain professional association. I got ahold of a copy of the actual Capitol Hill testimony by a representative of this association. A friend and I drafted a letter blasting this representative's testimony and faxed it to the association. Next thing we knew, the representative was no longer working for that association.
Televisions containing the mandatory circuitry went on sale in 1993, and not a moment too soon - only about 400,000 decoders total had been sold by 1992. This increase in caption-decoding televisions was still not enough to generate a huge increase in captioning availability. One reason was because captioning was still a voluntary activity, which often caused broadcasters to view it as something charitable which should be paid for by outside sources instead of simply treating it as another cost of business. In response, Congress in 1996 passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which mandated closed captioning on television. This act has helped to spur rapid growth in the closed captioning industry. While not everything on television is captioned, we have come a long way from the first 15 hours a week of captioned programming in 1980.
The captioning industry's growth is reflected in the website I started in 1995, Closed Captioning Web. While initially an all-purpose website, it has become primarily a resource for finding captioning services, and for finding jobs in the captioning industry.
The Future of Captioning
What does the future hold? As of now, research and development of voice recognition technology continues and one day, it may replace captioning as we know it today. Until then, the captioning industry continues to expand to meet the demand fueled by legislation.
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