Closed Captioning Hockey Viewing

[BigMcK]

3 games watched at the hotel lounge last week, all 3 with closed captioning turned on.

After every few lines of typed text, 'house' would appear, followed by 'thin' and then backspacing before any other word would appear. After 3 games of this, I wonder if closed captioning is typed by a live person or voice recognition software? A few player's names were totally butchered. My favorite was "Brizgaloff".

The captioning also takes away from the flow of the game like subtitles do on a foreign film.

[shafnutz05]

For live events, closed captioning is often voice recognition software, except in the case of major telecasts.

[pittsoccer33]

When I was selling tvs I had a partially deaf customer that taught me all about captions and subtitles. its actually pretty interesting stuff and Vitac, one of the largest providers of captions, is local in Canonsburg PA.

http://www.vitac.com/resources/index.asp

Live programming is captioned by specially trained realtime captioners who listen to a program as it is airing and type what they hear on stenography machines, often at speeds exceeding 240 words per minute. These words feed into customized software which transmits the captions to display them live on your television screen.

I am not sure if I have something set up incorrectly in my home theater chain, but I've noticed that when a secondary audio track is available on a program that I typically don't hear anything on that track. I love it for watching hockey and football - you hear the crowd and noise from the players but not the play by play.

[BigMcK]

pittsoccer33 Thanks for that link. As shaf noted, I would have thought it was voice recognition since 'house' and 'thin' were typed so often.

From FAQs: Are all programs captioned? All English- and Spanish-language programming airing between 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. must be captioned, with some exceptions.

Thinking about how many channels are offered by DirecTV -- and the volume of programming between those hours, there is a heck of a lot of typing going on.

[shafnutz05]

yeah, that's honestly what I've always been told. Thanks for the insight

[joopen]

Friend of mine did closed captioning after school for a while. They have a learning process. She started by cc'ing pr0n. Yes she wore out the "O" button.

[pittsoccer33]

A new law just was enacted that will force sites like Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo, etc to have captions on any web video that was previously on television. So if a clip from the Today Show or NHL Highlights are shown they must be captioned.

I believe Netflix has a pending lawsuit against it because not enough stuff is captioned and that's a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I was digging around on that site for a while yesterday and I linked it. Theres a really cool article on it about how the person who captioned the Academy Awards prepares for it.