

Netflix sued for lack of captions on streaming videos - benwerd
http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-captions-lawsuit/

======
dodo53
>According to the lawsuit, the ADA requires that all “places of entertainment”
provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities.

I'm sure it's lost in translation from legalese, but that seems like a really
broad requirement. How can you claim full and equal enjoyment of deaf people
at a nightclub say? Googled the act and tried to read it
(<http://www.ada.gov/statute.html>) but I can't parse it.

Edit: removed the bit where I said surely captions aren't hard - article links
to netflix saying it is ([http://gigaom.com/video/why-netflix-doesnt-offer-
subtitles-o...](http://gigaom.com/video/why-netflix-doesnt-offer-subtitles-or-
closed-captions/))

~~~
m0nastic
NetFlix has been trying to implement captions[1], it's actually a lot more
challenging then you'd think (with a library as large as NetFlix's).

They've been rolling it out slowly the past few months, but I'll at least give
them credit for trying.

I had never noticed the lack of closed captioning on online video until I
dated a deaf girl a few years ago, and then you sort of notice how much
content exists that is suboptimal when you can't hear.

[1] [http://blog.netflix.com/2011/02/30-of-netflix-streaming-
cont...](http://blog.netflix.com/2011/02/30-of-netflix-streaming-content-
has.html)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I notice it every time I'm linked to a news story that's only in a video
format. I'm literate, thanks, I don't need an announcer slowly explaining
things to me.

~~~
masterzora
This. A million times this. I don't understand the push that's been made on
the web wherein content that would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext &
images becomes videos. It is really easy for me to move freely spatially and
really difficult for me to move freely temporally and this is no different on
the web. Moreover, it is really easy for me to randomly access a single
sentence of text and actually pretty damn difficult for me to do the same with
a sentence of spoken word (and this is _before_ you account for my minor
hearing difficulties).

~~~
haberman
> I don't understand the push that's been made on the web wherein content that
> would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext & images becomes videos.

My guess is that it's better for advertising because they can show you ads
that cannot be skipped before getting to the content.

~~~
masterzora
That certainly explains some cases, but it definitely doesn't account for all
cases. I still distinctly remember a video someone made that was just reading
a joke list that is widely spread across the internet. The delivery didn't add
anything to the list. There was no reason to be a video whatsoever. A number
of howto-type videos are the same way (while some really do benefit from a
video, many more don't). I've even seen a few videos with no audio and the
only content was text on a black background.

My various problems with online video mean there's a lot of content from which
I'm essentially cut off unless I want to put forth a special effort, and such
effort is usually (though not always) not worth it.

------
illumin8
I hate to see lawsuits like this, but unfortunately it is the only way to get
captions on the majority of content. TV would not have captions if it weren't
for the brave fight of some deaf activists.

I never really appreciated captions much, but my wife does not speak English
as her first language, and not having captions on a movie sometimes means she
will be bored and unable to enjoy it with me.

~~~
benwerd
One of my best friends is profoundly deaf, and (obviously) they really
transform her experience. Only 0.2 to 0.4% of the population in the US is
"functionally deaf", but I think the principle is important: if it's required
on TV, why not on the Internet?

It's easy to forget about accessibility. Another friend can't use iOS devices
because he's mobility impaired, and is a little dismayed by the broad move to
touch-based devices. But they're cool to develop for, right?

~~~
silencio
iOS devices that come with the VoiceOver screen reader are changing the lives
of visually impaired people who were formerly limited to bulky and/or very
expensive devices with a limited selection of apps for mobile use. Nowadays,
any iPhone or iPad sold in stores works out of the box to do everything from
making phone calls to email, browsing, gps, games, productivity apps,
facebook, and more spoken in dozens of languages, displayed with different
zoom levels and higher contrast, and even in conjunction with bluetooth
braille displays.

I also remember back when Apple introduced easy to use videochat in iChat with
the iSight in ~2003 and again with FaceTime in iOS devices, and my deaf/hard
of hearing friends thought this was an awesome alternative way to communicate.

They _are_ cool to develop for, and I feel incredibly lucky to be working on
an iPad app for visually impaired people right now and to help said people
learn how to use the screenreader. It's amazing how I've watched some people
go from technophobia caused by progressive vision loss to being inseparable
from their newly purchased iPad/iPhone and doing more than they ever learned
to do on traditional computers.

The Apple Accessibility team is made up of incredibly cool people that always
seem to be open to suggestions to better improve their products. Your friend
should shoot them an email at accessibility@apple.com instead of just
grumbling about how iOS devices are out of his reach. I remember a lot of
blind folks I knew that grumbled a lot when the iPhone first came out, because
they thought an all-touch interface meant that the device was doomed for use
for the blind. That turned out to be very, very wrong. You never know what
they might have in mind, and maybe your friend has some cool ideas to pass on.

------
iloktr
So, am I allowed to sue Netflix if I can't afford to be a subscriber? What if
I only like a genre of movies that isn't available on Netflix? I understand
the need to have subtitles and in an ideal world, everything would come with
them, but this seems a bit too much.

~~~
macrael
The important distinction is that being poor or disliking Lost are not
considered disabilities per the Americans with Disabilities Act. That law
attempts to guarantee that anyone who is disabled has equal access to, among
other things, the entertainment available to those without.

I think your point is that it is a somewhat arbitrary to grant this group of
people this right of equal access compared to the two other groups you
mentioned, which certainly has some merit. But, that's the law, and Netflix
should have to follow it the same way the entire television industry does.

------
mirkules
Netflix shows intent with plans to expand to 80% by end of year. What's the
problem? Is having a lawsuit really going to make that happen more quickly?

~~~
blaqsmith
The deaf community has been nothing short of begging Netflix to add captions
for over 5 years now, and have essentially been ignored the entire time. The
usual excuse was that it was technically impossible to add the captions (bs,
really).

In the last year or so they've made slight motions towards implementing ~some~
captions, but have done a very bad job of it. Most shows would just have
random episodes captioned. So you start a new show, then a few episodes into
the season realize you couldn't keep watching them in order because the next
few episodes were uncaptioned. To say that this is frustrating, especially for
an arc based show like Lost (which was their flagship example of "we are
captioning for you!" for the longest time) is an understatement.

This lawsuit is essentially the deaf community having reached a boiling point.
These were patient people who tried for the longest time to get Netflix to act
like a decent company, and it just didn't happen. It's rather sad that without
this lawsuit, they probably never would.

~~~
jdludlow
They should probably stop sending Netflix $8 per month and support a
competitor instead.

It's absurd that a private business can be forced via lawyers to offer a
particular product. "We don't want to" should be allowed in a free society.

~~~
lukifer
In principle, I agree with you. On the other hand, what is the difference
between "We don't want to offer captions" and "We don't want to build
wheelchair ramps"? How about "We don't want to serve or hire [ethnicity]"?

~~~
thecoffman
In a free society all of those things WOULD be allowed. And most of us sane,
rational people would opt not to give those discriminatory companies money.
That's what freedom actually is. Its having the freedom to be an asshole,
bigot or racist, and its my freedom not to support that kind of behavior with
my wallet.

But yes, I agree, there isn't a big difference there, and personally I'm of
the opinion that the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating any
of it.

~~~
mrj
Sounds nice but look at the history of business. Laissez faire was attempted
and didn't work out so great.

Sometimes there need to be rules and they need to be applied evenly so nobody
has an advantage that others don't. If one business has to build wheelchair
ramps or close caption while another doesn't, that's an unfair advantage.

You can dislike government all you want, but don't pretend these things we
have would magically occur without some kind of intervention.

~~~
thecoffman
Obviously this isn't the forum to get into an economics debate, so I'll just
leave it at this: we have never, ever had true "Laissez faire" free markets.
We have always had corporatism/corporate capitalism. There is a very distinct
difference between the two. I am arguing in the theoretical "given a truly
free market" but we don't have such a thing, and never had, so it truly is
theoretical. Given the current situation I largely agree with you - given the
right circumstances however, I do think true freedom would work.

------
jamesbritt
Sort of surprised they aren't covered by some variation of the "safe harbor"
clause in ISP laws. They are not creating the content, they are making
existing content created by others available over the Web.

It's sort of like suing Blockbusters because they carry DVDs that do not come
with closed captions.

In any event their current captioning needs work. I tried watching "Stone of
Destiny", which takes place in Scotland, and these American ears could not
understand all it. I tried using the captioning but it had a very peculiar
glitch: every so often I would see a rush of captions for the next few minutes
of audio. It would vanish, and then I'd hear the audio it was meant for. So I
gave up.

I assumed their streaming was pulling the captions from whatever was provided
on the corresponding DVD.

I have a heard-of-hearing friend and when we watch DVDs together we almost
always turn on captions. However, some TV shows, such as from the BBC some
years back (e.g The Poirot series) have no captions. Are the American
distributors of these DVDs open to a lawsuit as well? What about my local
library, where I got them?

~~~
illumin8
I don't think that would work here. It would be like a TV station claiming
they didn't have to broadcast the caption stream because they were just
retransmitting content from a media company. Bottom line is the ADA says you
must broadcast captions.

~~~
jamesbritt
_It would be like a TV station claiming they didn't have to broadcast the
caption stream because they were just retransmitting content from a media
company._

Sure. But I've never thought of Netflix as a TV station any more than YouTube
is a TV station. They don't do scheduling, they don't have an obligation to
carry certain kinds of material (as, I think, TV stations must) and they
aren't using limited, licensed bandwidth.

I see NetFlix as a video rental store, like Blockbuster. They've just
abstracted the "get a disk, put it into a device, press play" thing by
allowing me to use their servers as my DVD player (more or less).

Also, if Wikipedia is correct, "Title III of the ADA requires that public
facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not
movie theaters), provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or
slide shows."

If anything NetFlix may be more of a movie theatre than a TV station.

------
xbryanx
They are a bit cheesy in visual style, but these videos
<http://www.ada.gov/videogallery.htm> communicate a lot of great information
about what is required by the federal Americans with Disabilities act, signed
by George H.W. Bush in 1990.

------
defen
Sort of off-topic, but can someone explain the theoretical basis behind class
action lawsuits, as applied to this instance? The article says "The Netflix
lawsuit was filed on behalf of the 36 million Americans that are either deaf
or hard of hearing." Is that just a turn of phrase, or can someone really file
a lawsuit on your behalf without your consent? (I'm assuming they didn't
contact all these people for permission ahead of time). Is there some central
registry of which Americans are deaf/hard of hearing? Will they be paid out
from the proceeds if NAD wins?

~~~
hugh3
_can someone really file a lawsuit on your behalf without your consent?_

Apparently so.

 _Is there some central registry of which Americans are deaf/hard of hearing?_

I doubt it.

 _Will they be paid out from the proceeds if NAD wins?_

If they win, then there'll be an ad in the paper (hopefully not on the radio)
inviting anyone who is deaf to fill out a form in order to claim their share
of the winnings (after a very substantial fee to the lawyers). It'll be a few
dollars. Hardly anyone will bother to write in, and lawyers will collect the
rest.

Everybody wins! And by "everybody" I mean the lawyers.

------
malkia
Since our son was born, we had to turn down the volume of the TV and rely on
the captions. Too bad sometimes even pre-recorded cable movie would not have
them (SHO or Starz I think). Or broken captions (It could be our digital box,
that's doing the rendering of the captions). I'm missing every 1 out of 10
captions while watching prerecorded Game Of Thrones on HBO.

------
kenjackson
Could someone sue Comcast so that I can turn on closed captions, without
having to completely turn off the box, go to the offline menue, change to
closed captions -- and then have to reverse the process to turn them off!?

------
fabiandesimone
I'm trying to understand why is so difficult for Netflix to add captions when
sites like <http://www.cuevana.tv> have had subs for quite some time now.

------
pchristensen
Stream (at least one movie) on the Netflix iPad app gave me captions. I was
really shocked to see it but pleased.

I think it was "Sabah" if anyone is checking.

------
robrenaud
It seems like captions are something that could so easily be crowd sourced.

How many times does each video on Netflix get watched? More than 1000? If just
1/1000 watchers is willing to transcribe the video, it's done. Hell, even
starting bootstrapping the initial transcription with a speech recognition
system would probably go a pretty long way.

You just need some clean UI and an easy way to have Wikipedia style edit
logs/discussion pages.

~~~
xbryanx
Transcription isn't the hold up for Netflix.

The issue for Netflix is either embedding the transcript directly into the
video (open captions) where you can't turn them off, or dynamically displaying
a text stream via your device software, as a layer over the video.

