Captions now available on Plus7

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Tuesday, 1 April 2014 16:52pm

The Seven network’s Plus7 has become the first commercial TV catch-up service to provide closed captions.

Captioning was launched on the service to coincide with the beginning of the 2014 rating season in February. All of the major shows on Seven now have captions on Plus7, including Home and Away, Revenge, Downton Abbey, Resurrection and My Kitchen Rules. Yahoo7, which manages the service, is planning further improvements to it in the future.

To turn on captions on Plus7:

  1. Select a program and press ‘play’.
  2. The program will be preceded by an advertisement which will not be captioned. Once the ad has finished, a ‘CC’ button will appear at the bottom of the media player.
  3. Click on the 'CC' button and the captions will appear.

“This is a great development,” said Chris Mikul, Media Access Australia’s Project Manager for television. “Prior to this, the ABC’s iview and SBS On Demand were the only catch-up services to provide captions. It’s terribly frustrating for Deaf and hearing impaired viewers to miss something on TV, then find the online version doesn’t have captions, so Yahoo7 is to be congratulated for making this happen.”

Thanks to legislation passed in 2012, all TV programs which are broadcast in the US with captions must be captioned when distributed online, but there are no such requirements in Australia. Last year, Media Access Australia released a report, Captioning on Video on Demand: It's Time for Australia to Catch Up, which makes recommendations for the creation of a regulatory framework which would significantly increase levels of captioning on online video. It can be downloaded from the Video on demand section of our website.

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