On February 8th 2017, the UK government passed an amendment as part of the Digital Economy Bill to make Video-on-Demand (VoD) subtitles a legal requirement. This means that all on-demand broadcasters will now have to subtitle a minimum level of their content to be compliant with the new law.
The amendment is the result of the “Subtitle it!” campaign launched in June 2015 by UK charity, Action on Hearing Loss, asking the UK government to end the digital exclusion faced by people with hearing loss when watching TV and films on-demand. This new law will give Ofcom the power to impose a minimum quota of subtitles, as well as audio descriptions and signings for Video-on-Demand content.
The amendment (Section 368BC, page 13) states that “The Secretary of State may by regulations impose requirements on providers of on-demand programme services for the purpose of ensuring that their services are accessible to people with disabilities affecting their sight or hearing or both. The requirements that may be imposed include:
(a) requirements for programmes included in the services to be accompanied by subtitling;
(b) requirements for such programmes to be accompanied by audio description for the blind;
(c) requirements for such programmes to be presented in, or translated into, sign language.
Up to today, the 2003 Communications Act provided the legal framework for the provision of subtitles on linear television; however there has been no such legal requirement for subtitles for on-demand content in the UK. This breakthrough amendment now gives Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, the power to enforce all broadcasters offering on-demand content to carry a minimum quota of content with subtitles, audio descriptions and signings. The new ruling applies to both on-demand services like those offered by the BBC iPlayer as well as Video-on-Demand platforms such as Amazon and Netflix.
When Action on Hearing Loss launched the “Subtitle it” campaign in the summer of 2015, the charity issued a report into on-demand subtitling – including catch-up TV and online film services: ‘Progress on pause: spelling out the case for subtitles on on-demand services’. The report found that more than two thirds of viewers who pay for subscriptions would switch their TV service providers if more on-demand content with subtitles was available elsewhere. It also found that 89% of people with hearing loss rely on subtitles to watch TV at least some of the time, and that 87% of people with hearing loss have started to watch a program on-demand and found that it had no subtitles. The amendment to the Digital Economy Bill puts an end to the digital exclusion faced by the deaf and hard-of-hearing people when watching on-demand content.
Ofcom will now undertake a consultation for the development of a new code that will lay out the quotas for the amount of on-demand content that must carry subtitles, and when the requirements will take effect. It will then report back to the government and make recommendations on the details of the code. After that, the UK government will outline the necessary regulation for the code to take effect. Charity Action on Hearing Loss caution that the implementation of the new law may be gradual “as the government may choose to give the industry a period of notice before the requirement takes affect or have a phased introduction, whereby the quotas for subtitled content are raised gradually over a period of years.”
Whatever happens during the Ofcom consultation period and in whatever measure the law will be enforced, on-demand broadcasters must start planning the transition today, working with an access services partner who can deliver high-quality and timely subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH), closed captions and audio descriptions. It is also important to note that many localisation and access services providers hold libraries of past content which has already been subtitled that can be beneficial in several ways for a broadcaster’s Video-on-Demand content library.
Related reading:
Two Thirds of Viewers Would Switch Video-On-Demand Provider for Subtitles
