Monday, June 21, 2010

Online Video Captioning

Many major video sites do not provide captioning including the TV shows on CBS.com, news clips at CNN.com and entertainment at MSN.com. Websites like NBC.com and Hulu.com provide it for some shows, but not others. Congress mandated in 1996 that most television shows must provide captioning, but no such rule exists for video on the Internet. In May, the Senate held hearings on the possibility of creating such a law. Meanwhile, industry groups are working to create a standard for online captions, before the government steps in. Google has pushed the ball forward by creating software that automatically captions video. Sites like Netflix is in the process of captioning its movie and TV streams while CBS says it is working on its own captioning program which will be out by the end of the year.