Purpose

• Closed captioning was a development aimed to make television accessible to those who are deaf or who have impaired hearing. Captioning works by running spoken text in written form across the bottom of the screen during TV broadcasts. It is also commonly used to describe background noise and sound effects. Viewers have the option of turning closed captioning on or off via their TV remote.
  
  

History

• ENCT developed as a way for news broadcasters to efficiently comply with national laws. In July 1993, U.S. law began requiring that all television sets with screens diagonally measuring 13 inches or larger must be capable of displaying closed captions via a built-in decoder. In 1996, Congress passed a law which required TV distributors to phase in closed captioning. By 2006, 100% of new programming was required to be captioned with only a few exceptions. Much of the focus was on news broadcasts, which were seen as important public access points. Before ENCT, stenographers and other professionals had to manually transcribe captions.
  
  

Script Conversion

• The Electronic Newsroom Captioning Technique quickly became a convenient way for news broadcasters to meet regulations without major disruptions to their services. Broadcasters were already producing a script which would feed in to the newsreader's teleprompter, and this script was the basis of closed captioning. ENCT technology allows the script to be broadcast at the same time as the news show, which could then be decoded by the TV sets, thus fulfilling the broadcaster's captioning requirements.
  
  

Drawbacks

• ENCT does have some drawbacks, as news programs by their very nature will regularly go off-script without warning. This could be the result of breaking news, or a live report which does not feed in to the teleprompter. Live interviews also pose a problem, as it is impossible to know exactly what the interviewee will say before transmission commences. This has resulted in a significant draw-down in ENCT use.
  
  

Federal ENCT Restrictions

• Beginning in 2000, the FCC required that the U.S.'s major networks not count ENCT toward their closed captioning requirements. This meant that ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC had to employ people to caption their news content live, else make up for the lack of closed captioning elsewhere. This rule also applied to non-broadcast networks, like cable, which served more than 50% of national households. Now that 100% of programs must be closed captioned, ENCT is not generally a feasible option for larger broadcasters.