Disney Screws the Deaf and Leaves Us Hanging.

If you weren't aware, Hollywood is trying to find ways to get people to buy their DVDs instead of renting. While Netflix is one of the greatest ideas ever, it's hurting the greedy producers of Hollywood because people are finding the idea of owning movies stupid since they can just have any movie they want dropped in the mail. So some corporate moron had this bright idea of sending rental companies bare bones DVDs specifically for renting purposes which removes special features like they did with the movie Up. Not only that, the same corporate moron decided that Closed Captioning and Subtitles for us was a "special feature".

Disney, you might as well remove the sound while you're at it, I'm sure that will definitely stop people from renting and start buying your movies. [Consumerist]

TVGuardian: A possible key to broaden closed captioning requirements.

TVGuardian® technology may be what we need to get CC on streaming videos.

If you're deaf like me, you want closed captioning everywhere such as TV, DVD, Blu-Ray, Cable, Satellite, Cellphones (iPhones), and most importantly on the Internet. Broadcasters and Movie Studios have done pretty well with providing closed caption on most of their shows on TV and DVDs. But as we all are aware, they are moving more and more towards online streaming and download services like NetFlix, Hulu, and more recently, Blockbusters via TiVo and thats where we are being left out with no Closed Captioning.

Well, TVGuardian® may change all that. TVGuardian® is a patented, award winning technology that automatically mutes out offensive language... while you're watching your favorite TV shows or DVDs. Here's the exciting part, this technology works by reading the Closed Captioned data transmitted from the broadcasting station or video source such as DVD.

The FCC wants comments from the public on whether tools such as TVGuardian should be required in a wide spectrum of video products, such as: TVs, DVD Players, Blu-Ray players, cable, satellite, computers, the Internet, cell phones, iPods/Mobile Video Players, Gaming Consoles (Xbox/PS3/Wii), DTV converter boxes, and DVRs.

Yeah, TVGuardian® is designed to allow you to choose whether or not you want your kids to hear or read the 1034 "F" words in the movie Departed, thats neat. But if we want Closed Captioning to be made law on all video products then we better voice our support by clicking here.

This is where you can read the full FCC Notice of Inquiry.

Lance

Netflix's Watch Instantly now on Mac! Closed Captioned? Not!

Yeah, I was really excited about the Watch Instantly feature finally being available on the Mac when I first found out. It is currently in Beta so this is where I'll provide my feedback. A couple of things worth talking about:

Netflix computes your bandwidth and figures out which movie quality to send you. This is actually very nice, it sets your expectations on how good the video will look based on how fast your internet is. I have somewhat slow internet so I get the Basic Quality most of the time. Today my internet was faster so they streamed a higher quality video for me. This is determined automatically. The basic quality is pretty similar to the YouTube quality... well, maybe a little better.

The Watch Instantly library is pretty limited to several thousands of movies that no one really watches anymore. But give it time, the list will grow and Netflix struck some recent deals with television studios such as Starz.

While a lot of streaming movies and TV show web sites are adding Closed Captioned features, Netflix has pretty much ditched us Deafies on this. I understand that studios have the option of providing CC content for the internet and such but Netflix is responsible for providing the technology to allow CC to work on it's streaming video players. So Netflix, we all know you're pretty much the last to do this so pull some strings will ya?

Wait, the snapshop above has closed caption!? Yeah, I figured that while I wait for the CC to be implemented I'll just explore the foreign movies genre where most of them are English Subtitled anyway. I normally don’t watch foreign movies so maybe I’ll discover a newfound interest.

So for all you Mac users with a bit of free-time check it out!

Lance