The NCAA News - News and Features

February 24, 1997

Comments sought for FCC proposal on closed-captioning

NCAA member institutions and conferences have until February 28 to comment on a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission that would implement a more demanding standard for the closed-captioning of telecasts, including those of athletics events.

Doris A. Dixon, NCAA director of federal relations, said the NCAA plans to respond to the FCC's proposed rules and said that athletics administrators and conference commissioners may also wish to do so.

Unless exemptions are made, the rules change would require almost all telecasts and cablecasts, regardless of the nature of the event, to be closed-captioned starting in August 1997.

Closed-captioning is relatively expensive, costing approximately $1,200-$1,500 per hour -- enough to make the difference in whether some nonrevenue events appear on television.

Division I athletics directors and commissioners received a summary of the issue in a February 3 letter from Michael J. Cleary, executive director of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics. He indicated that NACDA plans to file a set of comments to the FCC, pointing out "unintended consequences that may result from comprehensive closed-captioning."

The proposed changes could have major implications for nonrevenue sports and women's sports at all levels and program-wide implications at the sub-Division I-A level.

The FCC has been presented with the argument that sports telecasts are inherently visual and that supplemental information is made available in the way of frequent graphics. It also has been noted that sports telecasts are "perishable" -- that is, that closed-captioning costs cannot be spread over multiple showings, thus reducing the financial incentive to close-caption.

"However," the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking stated, "we observe that much national sports programming is captioned despite these issues and ... CBS provided real-time captioning of the entire 1995 and 1996 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship in a joint effort among several funding and captioning resources."

The 66-page notice provides some exemptions, but it does not at the moment provide a safe haven for local or regional sports telecasts, although it leaves the door open for changes.

"We ... do not believe that all local sports programming should be exempt from captioning because, to some extent, this type of programming may involve major-league sports teams, large production budgets and may achieve large audiences comparable to that of some national services," the Notice said.

"There may be, however, types of sports programming for which a closed-captioning requirement would be burdensome, such as locally produced college or high-school sports. Should those types of sports programming for which closed captioning would be economically burdensome fall under our general exemptions? In addition, we seek comment on whether there are alternatives to a closed-captioning requirement for this type of programming (for example, presentation of the basic information in textual or graphical form that would be less burdensome than a closed-captioning requirement)."

The FCC's "undue-burden standard" is based on the following criteria: