Deaf association to Netflix: Why no captions during free online showing of “Oz”?

Tue Oct 6, 2009 9:59AM EDT
Yahoo Tech
It was intended as a gift to movie lovers everywhere to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the classic film, but Netflix’s free streaming presentation of “The Wizard of Oz” this past Saturday wasn’t much fun for the deaf and hard of hearing, and the National Association of the Deaf is hopping mad about it.
Hacking Netflix reports that Rosaline Crawford, a representative for the NAD, fired off an angry letter to Netflix after Saturday’s free showing of “Oz,” which was streamed over the Web without closed captioning.

Crawford accused Netflix of ignoring an earlier request to provide closed captioning for the movie, and called for “a policy and timeline to provide captions” for its “Watch Instantly” streaming service.

“Unlike the characters in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Netflix looks like it is still searching for its brain, heart, and courage,” Crawford wrote, adding that the missing captions during Saturday’s showing of the film is “a blatant statement by Netflix that 36 million deaf and hard of hearing people are second-class citizens.”

The lack of closed captioning on its streaming movie and TV service is a sore point for Netflix, which explained in a blog post back in June that laying in subtitles for each of its 17,000-odd online titles isn’t as easy as it looks, and could be “about a year away.”

“Encoding a separate stream for each titles is not an option,” wrote Netflix exec Neil Hunt in the blog post. “It takes us about 500 processor-months to make one encode through the entire library, and for this we would have to re-encode four different formats. Duplicating the encoded streams is prohibitive in space too.”

Instead, Hunt wrote, Netflix “is working on optionally delivering the SAMI file (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange), or similar, to the client, and having it render the text and then overlay it on the video at playback time,” but “the tools for rendering SAMI files in Silverlight, or in CE devices” like the Netflix-enabled TVs and Blu-ray players “are weak or non-existent, and there is some technology development required.”

But that explanation isn’t good enough for Crawford, who points out that other streaming video sites, like Hulu and YouTube, already offer closed captioning-and she’s right. (The videos on Hulu and YouTube, it should be noted, are powered by Adobe’s Flash technology, while Netflix uses Microsoft’s Silverlight system.)

So, what’s the deal? Any streaming video experts out there care to enlighten us on why Hulu can handle closed captioning but Netflix can’t (or can’t yet)?

Update: Just got a statement from Netflix VP Steve Swasey: “Netflix developers are working on captioning for 2010 but the situation is exactly as Neil Hunt explained in the blog. Unfortunately, there’s no fast and easy fix.”