FCC Gives Industry Nine Months to Implement Video Descriptions

The Federal Communications Commission will give broadcasters and cable operators nine months -- until July 1, 2012 -- to have their new video description regimes in place.

The FCC is under a deadline itself since Congress gave it until Oct. 8, 2011 to have the video description rules in place. The rules implement the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which requires the captioning of any online video that is closed-captioned on TV, and asks the FCC to study captioning of Web-original video. It also requires smartphones and other mobile devices to be accessible to the disabled, if that is achievable, and restores the FCC's video description rules thrown out by the courts in 2002. The FCC order addresses some of the concerns of small cable operators, providing technical exemptions and clarifying that only systems with at least 50,000 subs in a market will be required to pass through the video descriptions.