Canada first country to achieve 100% broadcast captioning

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Wednesday, 6 March 2013 11:32am

Canada is already a world leader in television captioning with legislation mandating that all TV programs are broadcast with captions. Now, Canada’s media regulator, the Canadian Radio–television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), has announced that all TV commercials, sponsorship messages and promos will have to be captioned from 1 September 2014.

While captioning on all English and French language TV programs has been compulsory in Canada since 2007, the new rules mean that it will become the first country in the world where 100% of broadcast content has to be captioned.

The onus will be on the advertisers to caption their commercials, with the Television Bureau of Canada announcing that, once the rules take effect, all advertising content will be screened to ensure it has closed captions before being cleared for broadcast.

For more information, see this article on Entertainment & Media Law Signal.

The CRTC’s rules on advertising material follow the introduction of stringent new quality standards for captioning on Canadian television, which took effect in September 2012.

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