These are interesting times to be in the television production business. A key event is Congress’s mandate, enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that all television broadcasts be digital after February 17, 2009.
As the first major captioning services provider to have an all-digital facility, we’ve been ready for this for years. However, there’s a lot more to the switchover (as the digital mandate is often called) than simply being digital.
First, it may be helpful to review some basic terminology:
Tuner: A tuner is a device that allows you to find and change channels. Cable and satellite boxes typically have tuners. Television sets also have tuners. Tuners can be for either analog or digital TVs.
Analog TV: The classic television that’s been around since TV started. Uses analog tuner technology to manage channels.
DTV: Stands for Digital Television. Uses digital tuner technology. You need to have a DTV-capable television to display and manage digital programs. Many TVs today have both analog and digital tuners. The FCC has mandated that all TVs built after March 21, 2007 must have a digital tuner, but some stores continue to sell analog-only TVs, which must be labeled as such.
HDTV: A type of DTV, HDTV provides higher resolution than standard DTV (or SDTV). To get HDTV, you must have a television that is HDTV-capable and be using the tuner to select HDTV channels. HDTV television generally will not make SDTV channels any better. You can get HDTV free over the air (from broadcast networks) as well as though paid cable and satellite services.
As you can imagine, the switchover's impact reaches everyone in myriad ways. If you receive your signals over the air (through an antenna) rather than through paid cable or satellite services, and you have an analog TV, you need to get a converter box. You can get information from the FCC about their coupon program at www.dtv2009.gov (link opens in new window). The FCC also just recently issued an advisory (link opens in new window) on how specific converter boxes handled closed captioning and description.
The digital switchover also affects issues near and dear to our hearts: closed captioning and audio description.
Closed Captions
Digital closed captions promises to be a lot more fun for the consumer than analog. For example, you should be able to adjust the font size, text color and background. So if you prefer magenta text on a light gray background, your television or cable box should allow you to make that selection.
The most noticeable change for cable and satellite TV consumers will be the fact that the captions may be controlled by the cable/satellite box rather than by the TV. This is why some HDTV monitors don't even come with a tuner - they assume you will be using a cable or satellite box for that function.
The most popular cable for a high-quality connection between the cable/satellite box and the TV is called the HDMI cable. This cable does not pass the closed captions through it.
However, if the cable/satellite box opens the captions (as it should) then the HDMI cable will carry the open captions as part of the video signal.
Confusing? It’s not over…If you use the same HDMI cable to connect your HDTV DVD player to the TV, you may have a problem as many DVD players do NOT decode captions. Subtitles managed by the DVD's menu are not a problem.
Audio Description
The DTV standard makes it possible for a network's station to send the consumer multiple audio signals to choose from, such as a stereo audio signal, an audio description signal, and a Spanish audio signal. However, this is dependent on how the network chooses to set up their transmission hardware and network. To date, there is no single base standard for how networks will set up audio transmission services – or how the consumer can find and select such options. While a station could send all three signals, there’s nothing mandating that they do so. Even if they do, there’s a possibility that their network hardware may only support one secondary channel, not both.
We hope that the networks will work together to agree on a standard that will ensure the availability of audio description services in a consistent manner across all networks. If that happens, we will let you know on this website as soon as we know!