Closed captioning on television is just plain broken. I wrote before asking why advertisers don’t add captions to their ads, but today I realized the opposite problem can *cough* arise. Sometimes a caption from an ad may fail to clear and can remain sticky with the remainder of the broadcast.
The following broken closed caption images are from a television in a local sandwich shop. The TV was tuned to Fox News and had this one single caption locked in place for the entire time I sat eating. Broken TV? Broken transmission network? Broken ad? Broken Fox News?
If you haven’t watched the show, here’s the deal: A bunch of chefs all get together in a kitchen where they compete against each other for a reality show style prize. Each week, one of them is voted off the island *cough* kitchen, while the last one standing wins their own restaurant (for a year). The catch is that during each episode Gordon Ramsay screams at them incessantly while they’re cooking, and there’s not so much voting as just Gordon picking whomever he hates the most.
Ramsay is what makes the show so great. He’s been awarded twelve Michelin stars. Twelve! The man could probably setup shop in a cardboard box and get a Michelin star. He’s absolutely passionate about food, quality, and customer service. Watching him run a kitchen is like watching a true master craftsman do what he does best.
The contestants are a different story entirely. Every week the two teams compete in a challenge, someone wins, someone loses, and the losers have to perform some kind of punishment. Most of the time, the punishment is extra prep or kitchen cleaning. These punishments are almost always related to a typical restaurant task, but the amount of griping from the losers is usually insufferable. You would think that they had to clean septic tanks or something. They’re almost all chefs, yet none of them have passion for what they do!
If you love food, then you should love being with food. You have to do extra prep? Great! You love food and that’s what chefs do! You have to go pick vegetables from a field? Great! Thomas Keller grows his own produce for The French Laundry so that he can always have the best food in the kitchen.
Be passionate! Losing on Hell’s Kitchen should be like winning.
By the way, if you want to watch, you can catch episodes on Hulu. In fact, this gives me an excuse to try Hulu’s embedding feature. Here’s a nice video of grown men throwing tantrums because they have to go pick food from a field.
Quick question: why do so many advertisers not close caption their TV ads? While eating in a noisy restaurant the other day, I noticed the ubiquitous TV-tuned-to-ESPN had been muted with the captioning turned on. While the broadcast was close captioned, probably only about 30% of the ads were.
For advertisers, the economics of actually close captioning an ad should be a total no brainer! It’s a 30 second static piece of footage that may only rarely change between markets. It can’t be that expensive to get someone to type a page or two of text into the captioning system! Yet the number of people who are watching who would still see your ad, either because they are deaf or because they happen to be watching in bars or restaurants, is probably quite large.
Unless someone can tell me why these economics don’t add up, I’m inclined to believe it’s pure laziness; and that’s a total shame. For the amount of money spent on making an ad campaign, it strikes me as incredibly odd that nobody thinks of the strategy behind captioning it.
And if that’s not convincing, think of it this way. People who are watching TV and reading your ad are guaranteed to be paying attention to it! While their numbers are few, their attention is assured. Reach out to them!
While it’s on my sidebar, I really want to point out the Silicon Alley Insider; a blog run by one time securities analyst now banned from Wall Street for life Henry Blodget. He made some bad calls during the dot-com era, but Wall Street’s government mandated loss is our gain - SAI is an outstanding wealth of technology business analysis. Blodget’s post titled Hulu: Great Product, Still Screwed is a perfect example that captures the unsettling economic problems facing NBC and News Corp’s soon to be released online video service. (Disclosure: I posted a comment on the Hulu post).
While Blodget’s thoughts are well reasoned, I should also add some positive perspective. I have a beta membership to Hulu and I have to say the service is outstanding. The video quality is great, the ads aren’t terribly intrusive, and the interface is decent. My biggest complaint is that searching for videos is more challenging than I would prefer, especially for shows like Saturday Night Live where there are literally hundreds of clips available. Still, as far as legal online video goes, Hulu is the best thing going right now and leaves iTunes in the dust by virtue of being 100% free.
Which leads me to my next question about why I would even want to own a TV. With so much quality media online, does the traditional TV even matter anymore? I, for one, am not planning on buying an HDTV any time soon, and might even take the opportunity to just throw away my old TV when the digital switch happens next year. What are your TV plans (there’s a poll here if you don’t see it in your RSS reader):
Your TV plans for the next year?
I already own an HDTV (33%, 2 Votes)
I’m planning to buy an HDTV (0%, 0 Votes)
I’m planning to buy a converter (or have one already) (0%, 0 Votes)
I’m throwing away my regular TV and switching to the Internet (33%, 2 Votes)
No TV for me, either online or offline (33%, 2 Votes)
For anyone who watches 
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