EEG took part in the sights, sounds and tech at the 2016 Sports Video Group (SVG) College Sports Summit, held in Atlanta June 2-3.
One of the highlights was participating in the panel “Closed Captioning: Legal Ramifications and Execution,” where our VP of Product Development, Bill McLaughlin, helped shed light on how new FCC regulations regarding the closed captioning of digital video content are affecting content providers.
Topics addressed at the panel specifically addressed the fresh challenges these regulations present for the college sports video production community, including:
- What does the law require of you today?
- What steps can you take now to prepare your workflows?
- What are some best practices for efficient execution?
Bill joined Moderator Chris Taylor of Ball State University, Giovanni Galvez of Telestream, and Harvard University’s Director of Multimedia & Production Imry Halevi. If you couldn’t be there in person, here were some key takeaways:
Keeping Pace with Regulations
The latest FCC ruling means that the responsibility of closed captioning requirements were passed on to the video programmers earlier this year, along with certification of efforts to comply and accuracy. Schools both large and small are in the midst of understanding their full responsibilities in light of the latest regulations.
Harvard University’s Director of Multimedia & Production Imry Halevi noted the importance of doing research now in order to be ready when next-level captioning requirements are introduced by the FCC. “You’re not yet required to do captioning for college sports streaming online, but it’s coming, and when it does it will be great if we got out ahead of it,” he said of Harvard’s efforts.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a powerful driver of many emerging closed captioning rules. EEG’s Bill McLaughlin noted, “Whether you’re a public or private university you may have responsibilities under the ADA, that at an event or public venue you’re going to have to provide accessibility accommodations for events above a certain size to your audience. Although that can be independent of your responsibilities for airing on actual television, some of the same technologies and solutions can be shared for fulfilling these goals.”
Quick Guide to When Captioning Is Required:
FCC Regulations
- Covers Broadcast & Cable TV (Almost Everything)
- Covers Online Copies / Simulcasts of Same Material
Federal & State Law (ADA Section 508)
- Covers Public Universities & Many Private School Activities
- Applies to Sports, E-learning, Commencements, Public Lectures, etc.
What are the Campus Policies?
- For clarification, ask your legal/compliance department
- Find out if there is a community-agreed attendance minimum that triggers the necessity of closed captioning
Planning to Caption Live Streaming College Events
So you’re committed to captioning a live streaming event from campus ASAP. How do you determine the budget and method you’ll use? There are three main criteria to consider:
|
Transcription Quality |
Cost of Service |
Transcription Method |
|
👍👍👍👍 |
$$$$ |
Professional Realtime Stenographer (Court Reporter, etc.) |
|
👍👍 |
$$$ |
In-House “Re-Speaking” or Script Feeding |
|
👍 |
$$ |
Automatic Speech-to-Text |
EEG’s iCap is a collaboration with some of the largest captioning agencies in the country, which can make it easy to access expert live captioners.
From there, defining your delivery goals and the workflow are the next step. In other words, where are you sending the captions, and how will they get there?
As Bill explained at the Summit, how text gets into your system depends on what your “targets” are. When it comes to a college event live streaming scenario, there are three primary possibilities:
- Putting captions onto SDI video for traditional television broadcasting, which is also the easiest way to get them into a live Web stream.
- Open captioning, where the captions are always visible such as on a videoboard, or on an in-house TV system in suites. Many products that do captioning encoding also have a caption decoder, so they put out an SDI feed that already has the captions burned into them so that they’re permanently on display. These can also feed captions to a text-only display like a ribbon board.
- If content providers are doing live stream only, they may be able to bypass using a hardware encoder and have a text provider send data directly. This can be accomplished through a solution like EEG’s iCap Falcon System into streaming software like a Wowza Media Systems server, or into a YouTube live event sent directly to the cloud service.
Captions After the Event
After captions are deployed into a live stream, they also have a life ahead of them. Think ahead to a backend that will allow you to re-use (and maybe even improve) them for online, archiving and clips.
- Record and Store Your Live Caption Data
- SDI iCap encoders and streaming services allow this
- Covers online copies/simulcasts of same material
- Repurpose Them with Caption Editing Software
- You can edit text, re-time captions, and search metadata
- Use the resulting caption file for online clips or re-air
Good Questions
After the panel, moderator Chris Taylor opened up the floor to questions from the audience. Top queries included:
Q: How important is captioning to executives at educational facilities right now?
A: (Imry Halevi) People start caring when there’s a lawsuit involved, or a big donor starts complaining, saying, “I need captions. Why don’t you have captions?” So the more you inform people on the higher levels, the better, but unless a problem arises, don’t expect it to be a top priority for them.
Q: Do you see this going to place where captions are required in-venue?
A: (Bill McLaughlin) They are required right now. That’s already the case, and it’s really just a question of establishing a campus-wide policy. If your disabilities office doesn’t understand the technical details, that’s one thing, but someone at the school has to be responsible for articulating a policy. For example, “At the following list of venues, where there is an event with X or more number of attendees…” there has to be set of clear captioning regulations. If there are no rules, then you’re asking for a problem later on.
A: (Imry Halevi) Most major venues coming online now have a system in place for meeting ADA requirements.
At Harvard, where all our venues are older, a solution we came up with is that all of our encoders have two outputs: one is closed captioning, and one is open captioning -- the closed captioning is what you can’t see unless you turn them on in your player, while the open captioning is visible all the time. We have areas in our venue where we send the open captioning, such as several screens at hockey games. We’ve currently decided not to send them to the videoboard, however, since it impacts the in-game experience.
(Bill McLaughlin) Another alternative is that stadiums will have a small ribbon board that is text-only, so what the announcer says, or lyrics to songs, will scroll by on the ribbon board. Usually the signal path for that is a hardware captioning encoder that’s feeding off of a specially formatted size to a controller for that ribbon board.
(Halevi) At one of our venues, people are handed a tablet and captions are streamed in real time to the device. That’s really useful because not all audience members may not be in sight of a ribbon board. Also as opposed to the actual broadcast, they may have important announcements in the game that are captioned such as, “There’s a fire,” so they actually have someone doing the voice writing to send captions to the tablets at those times.
(Bill McLaughlin) That’s right. It’s important to note that your in-venue captions may be different then the outside-the-venue, media streaming broadcast captions. In those cases it’s not the announcers that are the commentators on TV, instead it’s the public address announcer inside the venue that must be captioned.
Do you have more questions about captioning on campus, whether it’s for sports, online learning, or other applications? Get in touch with EEG.