Local television news station compliance with online captioning rules

In 2010, the United States' Twenty-First Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) required local television broadcasters provide captions when they re-distributed their news broadcasts online if the material had been broadcast with captions. Concerned that broadcasters were trying to skirt the CVAA by breaking up the online version of their newscasts into individual clips, in 2014, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) mandated broadcasters caption online news clips as well, effective January 2016. Research conducted shortly before the rules announcement found many stations ill-prepared for the new mandate. In the current study, we examined a stratified sample of 20% of US television station markets to see how well local news stations responded to the new captioning mandate and to see whether or not the burden of captioning newsclips may have led to a reduction in the number of stations putting newsclips online, a concern expressed at the time by then FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. We found that while the captioning rate has improved substantially since studies conducted shortly before the law was announced, around 30% of the news clips we examined were uncaptioned. We did not find a reduction in the number of stations with video clips. All of the 156 sampled station web sites included video clips.