“Consumers are increasingly watching TV programs and movies online, on a variety of devices,” said the author of the report, MAA’s TV Project Manager, Chris Mikul. “In Australia, the only networks which provide captioning on their catch up services are the ABC and SBS. The only Australian video on demand service to offer captioning on some content is iTunes.”
The complaint against the Nine network related to an episode of The Big Bang Theory broadcast on TCN and GTV on 9 January 2013 in which the captions were intermittent. In submissions to the ACMA, Nine stated that the program had originally been captioned to tape in 2009, and there was a compatibility problem with these captions and the file-based system now used at its National Playout Centre.
A CAPTCHA is a test placed on the end of online forms which is designed to verify that a website user is human and not spam. The standard CAPTCHA is a string of letters or numbers that is distorted so that only the human brain, and not a computer, can interpret it.
All of these requirements stem from the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, a landmark piece of access legislation which was passed in 2010. It requires that TV programs which have been broadcast with captions must also be captioned when made available online, but the FCC has previously stated that this applies only to “full-length programming” and not short clips.
