Deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates had sued Netflix for allegedly violating the Americans with Disabilities act. Netflix admitted no wrongdoing as part of the consent decree, but agreed to pay the plaintiffs $755,000 in legal fees.

The company will now work to add captions to 90 percent of its content streamed hours within a year, with the final deadline for having all of its videos captioned being September 30 2014. Netflix recently partnered with the captioning platform Amara to experiment with  a crowdsourced approach to video subtitling.

Netflix isn’t the only company trying to add more captions to its videos. Amazon finally started adding captions to its Instant streaming service earlier this month, and YouTube recently began to ask its users to tell on publishers who don’t offer closed captions. Both moves are in response to FCC regulations that came into effect at the beginning of October, demanding captions for all online video content that previously aired on TV.

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A Netflix spokesperson told me that the company’s efforts on the site simply represent a test:

“Netflix is committed to accessibility and we have decided to test Amara to see if it could work for Netflix content. This is a small scale, early stage test. It is premature to discuss if we would actually use the titles resulting from this test or any future use of Amara.”

Netflix’s captioning community on Amara currently only features one video, which according to information provided on the site represents “an example of Netflix SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) Guidelines in action.”

Netflix is known as a company that is obsessed with testing. That being said, a service like Amara could represent a significant opportunity for Netflix. The company currently offers close to 50,000 movies and TV show episodes in the U.S., and has been expanding to countries where customers speak French, Spanish and Portuguese over the last few months. Netflix is slated to announce another international expansion soon, which could add another language to its roster.

Crowd-sourced captioning and subtitle translation could help to provide closed captions in all of these markets, and alleviate the pressure it’s been facing from deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates. Netflix was sued for not providing captions for all of its videos a year ago, and a judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed last month.

Amara originally launched as Universal Subtitles, and allows users to transcribe videos with a simple online editor. The site has been used by media organizations like Al Jazeera and the PBS NewsHour as well as the popular education site Khan Academy to crowd-source captioning and translation. I’ve been told by the Amara folks that its community has now subtitled more than 100,000 videos total.

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Hangout Captions were announced by Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black, who wrote on Google+ that users can either use in live captions from a professional transcription service, or simply do it themselves and type the spoken word into a text box within the Hangout app. “This is an early look at the app so you can tell us what you think,” she added. Black illustrated the functionality with the following video:

This isn’t the first time Google has addressed issues of accessibility for Google+. The Google+ team did some tests to better support sign language for the video chat service a year ago, and the company added captions for Google+ videos last month.

Google has also been adding a number of captioning features to YouTube. The site is now supporting machine captioning in multiple languages, and added captioning for live events a year ago.

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Aside from making the speech available in other countries, the captioning is also meant to make it more accessible to viewers within the United States that primarily speak a different language, as well hard-of-hearing viewers. The Newshour team is working with professional translators on some of the subtitles, while others are collectively done by volunteers through Universal Subtitles’ online tools.

Universal Subtitles was founded in early 2010 by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), an open-source media initiative that’s also known for its Miro video player. PCF co-founder Nicholas Reville told me in an email that the Universal community has subtitled 56,000 videos since it launched its web-based captioning tools in August of 2010.

The site has gotten help from 22,000 volunteers transcribing videos and translating subtitles, but is now looking to make its technology available to commercial clients as well. “The launch of the Newshour team represents the full rollout of our enterprise services for companies and organizations,” he wrote via email, explaining that the enterprise edition of Universal Subtitles uses both paid staff and volunteers as well as integrates paid transcription and translation services. He added:

“It’s amazing how many companies are getting in touch with us about managing their subtitles and setting up volunteer teams. I think the value of video is finally being recognized by a lot of companies and they want to make it searchable and accessible for more viewers.”

Some of the money invested by PBS will also be used to extend online videos with additional information, much like the White House did with its enhanced SOTU webcast Tuesday night. PBS Newshour will use Mozilla’s Popcorn player to add news and Twitter feeds as well as viewer-submitted commentary to videos of this year’s election cycle.

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The hypermedia movement, spearheaded by people like HTML5 developer Mark Boas and the Mozilla Foundation’s Ben Moskowitz, wants to make the remix and curation of audio and video sources as easy as Carvin’s countless retweets. The end goal is that “someone with a laptop in a coffee shop can do a very compelling news report,” Moskowitz told me a few days ago during a phone call with me and Boas.

Text as the ultimate meta-data

The idea behind hypermedia is as simple as it is compelling: More and more media publishers are providing closed captions for video content online – a move that is both prompted by SEO strategy as well as increased pressure to make web video accessible. And in the audio space, radio networks like NPR have long had transcripts of their recordings. Boas and others simply view this text as meta-data that points to specific pieces of a recording.

The Hyperaudio Pad doesn't look like an audio editor at all - and that may be a good thing.

What if there was an application, Boas asked in a blog post earlier this year, that would help compile new videos or audio recordings based on the remix of this kind of meta-data? “Audio authoring tools and video authoring tools can be quite complex,” he argued. Boas’ app on the other hand, which he has been calling Hyperaudio Pad, could look as simple as a text editor. Just copy captions from a few sources into the same document, and the program will automatically compile an audio recording. (Check out a screencast of the Hyperaudio Pad.)

The Hyperaudio Pad is so far not much more than a simple hack, and Boas and his partners in crime don’t even have a website yet, opting instead to discuss their ideas via a Google Group. But the hypermedia idea has been brewing for a while.

Radiolab and Al Jazeera

The Hyperaudio Radiolab experiment is an interesting mashup between audio, text and pictures that is based on Soundcloud's API and the Popcorn.js HTML5 media framework.

Boas started playing with synchronizing text and audio in HTML5 about a year ago. A few months later, he stumbled across a blog post by Henrik Moltke about the use of open web technologies to advance radio, an idea Moltke coined Hyperaudio. The two of them started collaborating, got some support from the Mozilla Foundation, and soon after, they had done some really interesting demos that show how powerful the combination of audio, text and the web can be (make sure to take a look at the demo for WNYC’s Radiolab if you haven’t seen it yet.)

Both Boas and Moltke come from the intersection of audio and HTML, which explains the moniker Hyperaudio. But that doesn’t mean that the Hyperaudio Pad and the ideas behind the technology will be restricted to radio programs only. “This can be applied to video as well as audio,” Boas assured me, and there’s a good chance that we will soon see some of the first hypermedia use cases for online video in action.

Boas was recently picked as one of five fellows for the Knight-Mozilla News Partnership program that pairs technologists with mainstream media newsrooms. Starting in February, he will work with Al Jazeera for a year to advance open source news innovation. “I hope to take the opportunity to develop the Hyperaudio Pad and other hyperaudio techniques and figure out how a newsroom can make use of these technologies, Boas told me, adding: “Specifically with the pad I want to tie into Al Jazeera’s subtitled content that they are building up using Universal Subtitles and build a resource around that for citizen journalists.”

Opening up the black box

The early demos build by Boas and Moltke are visually very compelling, and the idea to give users an easy way to curate audio and audiovisual media online is interesting as well. But the bigger vision for Boas and supporters like Moskowitz and the Mozilla Foundation is to create technologies that foster open media that is accessible to everyone both for consumption as well as creation, just like the web opened up text publishing to everyone by allowing people to easily quote and link.

Moskowitz told me that he views much of what happens now in traditional media organizations as a bit of a black box. Journalists work with very specialized tools on their stories and then spit out the finished product. The hypermedia approach could not just help citizens to curate the resulting stories, but also provide an avenue for media organizations to cooperate with citizen journalists and their audience as a whole. “It’s kind of opening up the black box,” Moskowitz said.

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According to the lawsuit, the ADA requires that all “places of entertainment” provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities. The NAD seeks to classify Netflix’s streaming website and associated consumer electronics applications under those terms, making it in violation of Title III of the ADA.

The lawsuit was filed despite work Netflix has done over the last several years to add captions to its streaming titles. It first announced the availability of captions on a limited number of streaming titles last spring, but it has been slow going: In February, Netflix announced it had added captions to titles that account for about 30 percent of all streaming, with plans to expand to 80 percent by the end of the year.

In a statement, Arlene Mayerson, Directing Attorney of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund said:

“There is no excuse for Netflix to fail to provide captions so that deaf and hard of hearing customers have access to the same movies and TV shows as everyone else… Netflix admits that there is no technological issue. For people who are deaf and hard of hearing, captions are like ramps for people who use wheelchairs.”

Netflix might disagree with the characterization, as it has been pretty vocal about the technological barriers that exist to adding captions. Two years ago Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt outlined the difficulty it faced in adding Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) files to its video assets, for instance.

Client support is better now, enabling Netflix to reach PCs as well as the Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, Google TV-powered TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes and the Boxee Box. But it still has a challenge in adding subtitles to new devices. While Netflix’s iPad and iPhone apps recently added captions, support for other CE devices — like the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Roku box — won’t be available until later this year.

Netflix isn’t the only streaming provider that is being hit with such a lawsuit: Earlier this week, the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD) and four individual plaintiffs filed suit against CNN for violating California’s Civil Rights Act by not providing captions. That lawsuit seeks class action status for all deaf and hard of hearing residents in California, and is seeking statutory damages from CNN parent Time Warner.

The Netflix lawsuit was filed on behalf of the 36 million Americans that are either deaf or hard of hearing. In addition to NAD, the Western Massachusetts Association of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired and Lee Nettles, a deaf Massachusetts resident, were also named as plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, Western Division.

Netflix has declined comment on the lawsuit, saying it doesn’t comment on legal issues.

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Critical Media will add TV and radio content from BBC to its Critical Mention service, which already captures and indexes more than 1,000 media sources from all around the globe. Altogether, more than 30 hours of TV and radio content are being captured and indexed by Critical Media per minute. The new cooperation adds content from BBC One, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC World and other Beeb outlets to the mix, according to a spokesperson.

Media monitoring isn’t just about giving brands a competitive advantage; it’s also a hotly-contested market itself, with companies like TVEyes promising similar services to companies that can afford it. Add to this the growing importance of closed captioning and video indexing online, and you’ll end up with many places where one could turn to find clips mentioning a certain brand.

However, Critical Media aims to outgun the competition by making media monitoring one piece of a bigger puzzle, which also includes services it provides to broadcasters. These include Syndicaster, a service that transcodes clips for local news networks which we covered a while back.

This approach of helping both brands and broadcasters has worked well for Critical Media in the U.S., where Critical Mention now indexes content from all 210 TV markets. The company plans to expand its business offerings to U.K. brands later this year.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ell brown.

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