Peoria Pundit Bill Dennis has been complaining about handicapped parking spaces for a while. This prompted C.J. Summers of the Peoria Chronicle to complain about another way the government makes things worse by trying too hard to help. In this case, it’s a new law mandating that all programs — including church service broadcasts — include closed captioning:
Now, I’m all for closed captioning. But the problem is that it’s expensive. The first thing you have to do is transcribe your program. You can do it yourself (labor-intensive) or hire a professional stenographer (or “stenocaptioner”) at $1.50 to $3 per minute, or $90-$180 per one-hour show. Then you have to get it into the video stream using an encoder. Encoder services can run you $300-$400 per one-hour show. Alternatively, you could buy encoding equipment and do it yourself, but then you have your own labor costs, plus equipment that can cost as much as $20,000. Your closed-captioning cost is now almost as much as the fee you’re charged to broadcast the program on a local TV station. So what do you think smaller operations are going to do? Stop broadcasting their programs, of course. Or at least remove them from some smaller markets, like one show in New York is doing.
What Mr. Summers is saying is that the government’s heavy-handed approach to increasing the number of closed captioned programs actually made is too expensive to produce programing?
The phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is pretty much the same as “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
4 responses so far ↓
1
Joe Clark
// Dec 29, 2005 at 12:07 am
Broadcasters, including church broadcasters, have had 30 years to get used to the idea that deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers have the right to accommodation in television viewing. They had, moreover, years of notice of the 6 January 2006 deadline for 100% captioning of non-exempt programming. They have, moreover, a mechanism to apply for a waiver.
Hence they have nothing to complain about. If you can’t afford to caption your show, should you be in the TV business?
2
American Guesser
// Dec 29, 2005 at 12:39 am
And the fact that these costs can drive small broadcasters out of business is not relevant. Typical. A favored special interest group is supposed to benefit from a government regulation, so the damage done to a non-favored group is dismissed out of hand.
3
C. J. Summers
// Dec 29, 2005 at 7:31 pm
American Guesser: Welcome to the blogosphere — good to have you aboard! Thanks for the link.
4
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