I’ve written before about the positive collaboration between politicians, regulator, broadcasters, lobby groups, technologists, service providers and the audience in the UK which led to enormous progress being made in the 1990s and 2000s in terms of the volume of accessible content on television. It’s worked well in some other countries too – notably in Australia, the US, Canada, Japan, France, and Spain.

That same collaboration continues to do some positive work in terms of TV accessibility (see recent work led by the FCC, ACMA and Ofcom on the issues around the quality of TV closed captioning services) but it is failing to overcome a much bigger challenge – that of access to the exponentially increasing volume of content not viewed on a linear TV channel, or on a TV for that matter. And maybe the current regulation-driven thinking cannot solve this. The media and technology world seems to be changing too fast for regulators to keep up. We’re in danger of letting all that progress fall away just as we were getting somewhere. We need to think differently, don’t we?

Consider this. One recent study, led by Discovery Digital Networks, found that adding closed captions to a YouTube video led to a 13.48% increase in views in the following 14 days. Having closed captions also boosted the lifetime views of a piece of content and the search rankings for that piece of content. And revenues, whether via subscriptions or through advertising, depend directly or indirectly on the number of views and therefore on people being able to find your content in the first place.

So if you’re a content creator who wants as many people as possible to find what you’ve produced and view it all, then you produce closed captions for that video. You don’t need a regulator to tell you that – you might not have realised it yet but your business model requires it. And not any old captions – they need to have the right words in all the right places.

Of course we need more studies like the one above. We need more evidence and we need some experimentation to tease out some more specific conclusions. But there’s clearly something to go on here to replace the regulation-led paradigm.
1. Any content that people are seeking to monetise requires closed captions to maximise the reach and therefore the revenue opportunity.
2. Closed captions must be complete and accurate to support that monetisation.
3. The cost of producing that complete and accurate text needs to be less than the additional revenue opportunity created by adding closed captions. And universal pressure on business model margins means continued focus on the cost of production and therefore on the development of automated technologies in the production of text. The good news is that the cost of producing closed captions is already very competitive – and there’s an increasingly sophisticated and capable industry out there to provide the additional capacity needed.
4. Lobby groups should encourage further studies into the value of closed captions and focus their lobbying efforts on where the money is being made from content. If there aren’t closed captions, there are more viewers to be had and more money to be made.
And let’s remember that the value of closed captions is not only about search. Adding closed captions means your content can be viewed in public places. Your video can be followed in noisy environments. It can be made more comprehensible to people whose first language is different from the original soundtrack. Your content can support the language development of millions, reaching new audiences desperate to learn (see Brij Kothari’s work in India among others). Oh, and let’s not forget the small matter of your deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Add all that up and get captioning!

David Padmore, Head of Access Services