Working Group Welcome Netflix to NZ with captioning

Press Release: 3 March 2015

The Captioning Working Group Welcome Netflix to NZ with captioning!

As members of the Captioning Working Group, The National Foundation for the Deaf, Deaf Aotearoa New Zealand and the Hearing Association New Zealand are pleased to welcome Netflix to New Zealand on March 24 with closed captioning.

Captions are good for accessibility. It can be expected that many New Zealanders who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing will take up a subscription to the Netflix service offering entertainment options with closed captioning on multiple devices. Captions give access and they are great for business!

Netflix have no plans to go into local television or sports (yet) however the introduction of Netflix (with captioning) to the New Zealand market is a significant move as reported widely in the press today.

New Zealand is one of the few western countries without legislation in place requiring captioning which leaves many New Zealanders guessing what is said on TV or online.

The recent explosion of On-Demand and subscription services in New Zealand only serves to underline the issue of lack of captioning accessibility. Whilst there have been small increases in TV captioned access in the last 5 years achieved through efficiencies at the Able Trust (the captioning service funded by NZ On Air) and technology leverage, the accessibility gap is widening.

TVNZ’s On Demand service, re-launched recently after a major upgrade, does not offer captioning. Nor do the NEON service offered by Sky or Spark’s Lightbox. Some free to air channels don’t caption at all. There is limited captioning of news broadcasts outside of One News.

The Captioning Working Group are calling for introduction of legislation requiring broadcast captioning of free to air and subscription television. Research shows that until legislation is enacted, Broadcasters and service providers will not introduce a reasonable rate of captioning.

-ENDS

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