This is an intervention in Broadcasting Public Notice 2008-12 by Quebecor. I oppose the application for licence amendment.
This intervention is permanently located at the address:
Fin novembre 2007, Illico sur demande a atteint près de 75% du sous-titrage du contenu, et ce, en excluant les films réservés aux adultes et les émissions ciblant les enfants d’âge préscolaire.
Quebecor admits it excluded adult programming and preschooler programming in deciding what would be captioned. It admits it never had any intention of meeting even 90% captioning.
Its next figures («Au 30 avril 2008, nous avons réussi à atteindre le niveau de 83%. Le niveau de 90% devrait être atteint d’ici septembre 2008») clearly include programming that is not adult programming or for preschoolers. In other words, it captions 83% of nonporn/nonpreschool shows now and will caption 90% of nonpreschool/nonporn shows by September.
Quebecor admits that the entire quantity of programming for which it seeks an exemption will, as of September, account for only 10% of its shows.
[L]a VSD est souvent la première fenêtre de diffusion d’une œuvre audiovisuelle alors qu’auparavant, ce rôle revenait à la télé payante ou à la télévision généraliste. La télé payante se consacre en majeure partie à la diffusion de longs-métrages. [...] Personne n’avait donc imaginé en l’an 2000 que les entreprises de programmation VSD allaient souvent se retrouver les premières entreprises dans la pyramide des fenêtres de diffusion et que conséquemment, le coût à assumer pour le sous-titrage pour malentendants lui reviendrait.
Shorter Quebecor: “In the olden days we would offload the trivial cost of captioning onto whoever had first-window rights, then just air the precaptioned tape. Now that we’re the first window, we’re stuck with the cost of captioning.” (That’s true: Broadcasters are stuck with the cost of captioning. The CRTC affirmed that such a cost is to be expected under a broadcast licence in CRTC 2004-10.)
Le sous-titrage de ceux-ci a une longue vie utile, car les films passent et repassent à la télévision généraliste et à la télévision spécialisée.
Longevity of programming has nothing to do with the requirement to make it accessible. If that were the case, then most live shows would never be captioned, as they are aired once and never seen again.
Le retard d’Illico sur demande en cette matière s’explique donc par le fardeau du sous-titrage qui se révèle beaucoup plus lourd que prévu. Enfin, il ne faut pas sous-estimer les embûches à la mise en place des fonctions et traitements administratifs d’une entreprise en démarrage.
Quebecor claims that captioning costs are “heavy,” going so far as to insist we refrain from underestimating them, but fails to provide numbers. Later, we’ll see that Quebecor admits its service is making tons of money.
Quant aux films réservés aux adultes et émissions ciblant les enfants d’âge préscolaire, l’exploitant de la licence ne fait pas et ne prévoit pas faire de sous-titrage pour ces deux types d’émissions.
Quebecor blatantly admits it never intended to caption adult programming and preschool programming, a flagrant violation even of its existing licence requirements (as those two categories of programming surely account for more than 10% of what is shown on the service).
The CRTC has been muttering of late that it would be nice if it were actually able to fine broadcasters who disobey the rules. But why wait? Here we’ve got a broadcaster admitting up front that it never intended to comply with its requirements.
En effet, les enfants d’âge préscolaire ne savent pas encore lire et le contenu des émissions qui leur sont destinées est généralement très visuel.
If preschool programming is so “very visual” that it doesn’t need captioning, which is itself visual, then it doesn’t need audio, either. I would be happy to endorse a plan by Quebecor to air preschool programming without captions if and only if it also aired without audio. I would endorse an alternate plan in which this “very visual” programming were aired with “very visual” open captioning.
All of this is, of course, simply an excuse cooked up by a broadcaster that doesn’t want its profits eaten into by a requirement to serve people it never wanted as viewers in the first place. (Quebecor did not get into this business to serve cripples.) But unfortunately for Quebecor, I have most of the research here on students’ and children’s responses to captioning. Neither Quebecor nor the CRTC has that research, despite the fact that it’s publicly available, so let me inform you of one finding from one study.
Lewis and Jackson (2001) studied verbatim captioning among deaf students. Among the tested conditions were video with captions, captions on blank video, and printed transcript of captions. The combination of captions with video was found to result in higher comprehension scores, meaning that while visuals are, as Quebecor implies, important, captions are just as important and the combination of both forms a gestalt.
This study... did not find a significant difference between comprehension of captions on a black video or as a transcript. We found that the captioned video aided comprehension of the narrative, beyond what deaf students were able to understand from reading the captions alone. This research study has demonstrated that for students who are deaf, the visual information in the scenes combined with verbatim captioning increases comprehension of regular televised programs....
I have other research on the topic. An inference that can be drawn from all the research is that the absence of captions is not inconsequential; as with all other programming with soundtracks, if you’re deaf you cannot understand the program without captions. Quebecor disingenuously claims otherwise.
Alors, les coûts afférents au sous-titrage pour un auditoire qui ne le comprend pas nous paraissent injustifiables.
I assume Quebecor does not seriously contend that only preschoolers watch preschool programming. Aren’t their parents right there in the room with them? And their older siblings? (If no one but children watched children’s programs, then Pee-wee’s Playhouse would not have become a modern classic.)
This argument was already dismissed by the CRTC in the renewal of Treehouse’s licence (CRTC 2004-27): “The Commission is of the view that the captioning of preschool programming is important, in part to ensure that parents are able to access the programming their children watch. The Commission further notes that older children would also benefit.”
Dans le cas des films réservés aux adultes, d’une part, le Conseil admettra que le dialogue est généralement peu utile à la compréhension.
In that case, air the films without audio, or to more specifically respond to Quebecor’s specious claim, sound-edit the programming to remove dialogue.
D’autre part, cette industrie (producteur ou distributeur) ne sous-titre pas ces émissions (films) réservées aux adultes.
Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant in the context of a licensed Canadian broadcaster. The programming when aired on the broadcaster must be captioned. We see now that Quebecor really does want to offload captioning costs onto other parties, and, when programming shows up on its doorstop uncaptioned anyway, they want to evade any requirement to caption it.
The Movie Network captions its porn, and so will Northern Peaks, if it ever finds a distributor. (That latter requirement attracted mainstream press coverage and sniggering on blogs.) Soft-core porn is captioned on SexTV: The Channel. Francophone broadcasters continue to believe they are special and exempt, but of course they aren’t.
Comme ce genre d’émissions est prisé (34% des commandes payantes) et à cause du grand nombre de titres disponibles (300 à 400 titres sont disponibles en tout temps pour un total de 1 000 nouveaux titres par année), les coûts d’une telle opération seraient considérables par rapport au service rendu à la communauté des personnes sourdes et malentendantes.
If they’re offering 400 kinds of porn, then porn is really popular and they’re making money hand over fist on it. “300 to 400 titles” is the wrong way to look at it (or rather, it is among the wrong ways). 300 or 400 shows air with captions every week on a few channels in Canada. It’s a manageable number, particularly when one considers that these are one-time costs: Caption it once and you’re done.
Note that Quebecor claims that “the costs of such an undertaking would be considerable,” but provides no numbers to back up the claim. (Quebecor restates the same claim later, with the same lack of evidence.)
Quebecor has not tendered an alternate method of reducing its cost burden, as by reducing the number of titles. If “the CRTC will admit” that dialogue isn’t very important in porn, then each individual porn title isn’t very important, either. Straight porn is, I should imagine, largely interchangeable. I doubt that Illico subscribers would notice a smaller avalanche of porn rather than a larger one. Instead, Quebecor asks for permission to infringe the legal rights of people with disabilities merely so it can save money.
All parties are aware that Quebecor is rich and profitable and is using this line of argumentation as an excuse to avoid spending money on its legal requirements. Such legal requirements may or may not put a dent in Quebecor’s profits (there is no evidence either way), but that isn’t a consideration.
Perhaps most offensive is Quebecor’s claim to be terribly, terribly concerned about serving its “handicapped” viewers.
[D]ans les deux cas, émissions pour enfants d’âge préscolaire et émissions réservées aux adultes, les dépenses engendrées outrepasseraient grandement le service rendu au public,
Note well: Quebecor explicitly states that its costs outweigh the legal rights of people with disabilities.
nous croyons préférable de consacrer les ressources financières de la VSD à l’amélioration de la quantité et la qualité des émissions y compris au sous-titrage des émissions qui visent le grand public. [Nous croyons] qu’il est important de fournir le meilleur service possible à divers groupes de personnes et certainement aux personnes handicapées. [...]
Vidéotron reconnaît que le sous-titrage est un service essentiel pour les sourds et les malentendants.... Par conséquent, la requérante est convaincue que cette proposition de modification favorise l’intérêt public puisque les fonds disponibles seront utilisés à meilleur escient pour acquérir des titres qui n’auraient pas été disponibles autrement.
Shorter Quebecor: “We’re very concerned about ‘handicapped people.’ We just don’t want to have to pay to help them. We can serve them better if we give them less of what they need.”
And actually, Quebecor has not put forth a plan to reallocate funds for captioning adult programming and preschool programming into other captioning; it has merely asked for permission not to spend any money on captioning those two categories of programming.
I remind the CRTC and the licensee that quality of captioning is and continues to be an issue. CRTC and broadcasters are under the impression that the secret CAB committee cooking up a captioning “standard” (meant to supplant the failed attempt of the previous secret CAB committee) will solve that problem once and for all. It won’t.
Be advised that each and every licensed broadcaster is subject to human-rights complaints concerning captioning and audio description. The broadcasting industry has a 100% record of losing (“settling”) those complaints.
It is established, even by that original failed CAB captioning “standard,” that fictional narrative programming is impossible to understand using scrollup and/or real-time captioning. We know already that Quebecor has filed this application for a licence amendment under the guise of serving the public (by giving them less service), though it is plainly apparent the entire purpose is to avoid having to spend money. When their application is denied, they will attempt to do an end-run around the denial by using the cheapest captioning they can find, i.e., scrollup. Fictional narrative programming, including porn and preschooler programming, has to be rendered in pop-on captions, and yes, those cost more. It is settled policy that captioning is a cost of doing business.
Jelinek Lewis, Margaret S., and Dorothy W. Jackson, 2001. “Television literacy: comprehension of program content using closed captions for the deaf.” J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 2001 Winter 6(1):43–53