AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! Collaborate On Web Video Captioning

There's some GREAT news in the captioning world this week from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to collaborate with NCAM to establish and manage a new International Captioning Forum to set standards for captioning on any kind of video presented on the Web. This critical mass of industry leaders provides real hope that captioning on the Web will one day be as common as closed-captioning on TV, which is now required in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission. It follows other recent positive developments, including Apple making its Quicktime video player caption-friendly, and NBC making a bold decision to invest in captioning for all its prime-time shows that are streamed over the web. It's yet another breakthrough move by NCAM and WGBH, which have led the way in not only advocating for accessible media in all forms -- whether it be captioning on TV or in the movies, or audio description technology for blind moviegoers, or the booming video-on-the Web medium -- but also in actually making it happen.

Posted by David at 02:53 PM on Oct 5, 2007 in CAPTIONING, ISSUES & ADVOCACY

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://hearingmojo.com/blog-mt/mt-tb.fcgi/174

Comments

As someone who uses Linux exclusively and is tired of the QuickTime proprietary format, I would hope that NCAM rethinks its approach and follows an open-source open standards model that allows ALL Deaf people to enjoy the benefits of captioning, not just those who had to buy proprietary products.

Posted by: Bryen | March 1, 2008 10:19 AM

The Open & Closed Project will not produce an “open-source” standard, a contradiction in terms. For a standard to be a standard, outside parties cannot freely rewrite it.

Posted by: Joe Clark | October 17, 2007 02:40 PM

This is good news, but however, I prefer the open source, exchangeable captioning standard.

I would hate to see the captioning format to be in a proprietary format.

Have you heard of "Open & Closed Project"?

http://openandclosed.org/

Posted by: Rene Visco | October 5, 2007 06:30 PM

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)