Three Dollars a Minute

There is no longer any such thing as "undue burden" when it comes to closed captioning. The letters requesting exemptions that were filed with the FCC (hat tips to Cheryl Heppner and Ed Bosson, who reprinted Heppner's information) cited costs such as:

• $150 per hour (or $75 per half hour)
• $195 per hour (or $97 per half hour)
• $130 per week (assuming the program is a half hour)
• $300 per half hour

The churches claim that these costs are burdensome, and may force them to stop producing their programs. Even if the churches rely on donations, these costs do not sound burdensome to me. Just how much of a burden can $90 per half hour be, given the total cost of producing a program? Curiously, few of the letters cite any figures regarding the total cost of producing their programs. One does say that air time is $450 a week - compare that to $90 or less per week. Another one says weekly production costs are $350 a week, and cites price quotes that they claim will increase their costs by at least 40 percent.

A little more comparison shopping would probably have yielded lower price quotes - there are over a hundred captioning service providers, including post-production houses that do captioning, in the United States and Canada, and some are willing to give discounts to nonprofits.

In an era when it costs less to closed caption a half hour program than it does to buy a business suit, there is no longer any such thing as "undue burden." The three dollars a minute that this blog post title refers to? That is the price cited on the website of TalkingTypeCaptions.com.