Amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act passed last year introduced captioning requirements for subscription TV services.
Fetch TV has requested exemptions for the following 21 channels:
The ABC Emergency website offers a summary of alerts and warnings by state and territory. The site is updated frequently with information sourced from ABC Local Radio and ABC News.
ABC Emergency also features a guide to preparing a bushfire survival kit.
The new rules are included in the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, and came into effect on 30 September 2012. They state that most full-length, non-live programming must be captioned if previously broadcast on television with captions. Monitoring of programming available on Amazon’s ‘Instant Video’ service in October and November showed that between one and eighteen programs a day were not captioned which should have been. They included popular programs such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Fringe.
