Netflix to add captions to video streams next year

DIGITAL: Some customers say timeframe is too long

By Danny King -- Video Business, 6/15/2009

JUNE 15 | DIGITAL: Netflix said it’s about a year away from having closed captioning or subtitles available on its video-streamed titles after receiving inquiries that stemmed from CEO Reed Hastings’ comments on the subject last month.

The largest U.S. rental service via mail will complete the process of creating text files that give customers the option of enacting captions on digital titles on devices using Microsoft’s Silverlight components sometime in 2010, Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said on the company’s community blog late last week. Hunt added that encoding a separate caption stream for each title is both cost- and bandwidth prohibitive.

“Captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away,” Hunt wrote on the blog.

Hunt’s explanation likely stemmed from brief comments Hastings made on the subject at the company’s annual shareholders meeting last month, said company spokesman Steve Swasey. With Netflix looking to broaden both its digital titles and the number of devices that can play them on televisions, the company is trying to be “transparent” about its closed-captioning efforts, Swasey said.

Still, Hunt’s explanation and timetable may have spurred further debate, as more than half of the approximately 40 comments responding to his blog post were critical of the company for either using Silverlight components or for what they say is too slow of an effort relative to such online-video sites as YouTube and Hulu, which both provide closed captioning for some of its videos.

Swasey declined to comment on closed-captioning capabilities on other video sites.