closed captioning.

For those of you who are not aware, there is a giant struggle amongst deaf and hard of hearing individuals these days regarding captioning availability. Yes, most television shows are now captioned thanks to progress and improvement since captioning first became available. As technology progresses though and things such as Hulu and youtube are blowing up in popularity, the deaf community is fighting for captions to be available in these mediums as well. Personally, my biggest pet peeve regarding lack of closed captioning has been with Netflix. All Netflix members pay x amount of dollars to get x amount of movies in the mail, but all members also have access to multiple more movies via instant streaming. However, NO INSTANT STREAMING MOVIES OR TV EPISODES ON NETFLIX HAVE CLOSED CAPTIONS. This has been a major battle that has long been covered by celebrities such as Marlee Matlin and blogger enthusiasts such as Jamie Berke.

Netflix made an announcement a few days ago saying that they were just starting the process of making captions available for instant streams. Here is the link:

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/04/subtitles-now-available-for-some-titles.html

If you're wondering why I don't sound more ecstatic, it's because I've read in between the lines. Neil Hunt is saying that about 100 titles now have closed captioning available, but Netflix is continually working on more. He then says to "try it" with Lost seasons 1-4. I've already seen Lost seasons 1-4 so naturally, I wanted to try it with my first instant stream movie. I had no luck in finding one since there is no list of captioned titles and no way to look them up. Then of course, I realized that in Lost seasons 1-4, there are 100 episodes - the amount of "titles" Hunt said had been captioned.

Dear Netflix:

I realize that the technology has to be figured out but I think it's taking a long damn time. You could have started this process when instant streaming first became available because you believed in equality, instead of starting the process now when there is much discourse over bill HR 1301. I'm paying the same amount as other Netflix members but they have access to a significantly larger number of movies because of instant streaming - which I can't understand without captions. And even if I was able to dig down and use my patience to be understanding about the technology's complexity and time-consumption, please DON'T write an unprofessional blog entry which inaccurately portrays Netflix's progress on caption action and furthermore, creates false hope for those of us who have been waiting for this for a long time. No games are necessary. Just please be honest. And get moving.

Sincerely,

frustrated