Closed Captioned Internet Videos on Hulu

Bill Accessibility & Equal Access, Captioned Video, Entertainment, News,

Hi yall!

Got a nice answer back from Eugune at Hulu about Closed Captioning on Internet Videos:

You can turn on closed captioning in the player by clicking on the
(cc) button next to volume control.

We currently have subtitling on a portion of our catalog. Here are the
titles and video counts of those videos:
[bill:sample links are mine – and these are High Quality, folks!]
American Dad! (9)
[couldn’t find any samples]

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? (17) Example Episode
Vodpod videos no longer available. from billc.vodpod.com Once you click Play, hover over the video to see the menu, and the cc logo
Back To You (9) Example Episode

Bones (12) Example Episode

Canterbury’s Law (2)

Cops (15) Example Episode

Decision House  (2) Example Episode

Dirt (1) Example Episode

Family Guy (8) Example Episode

House (9) Example Episode

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia  (13) Example Episode

King Of The Hill  (12) Example Episode

Kitchen Nightmares (10) Example Episode

K-Ville (9)

New Amsterdam (3)

Prison Break (8)

Talkshow with Spike Feresten (12)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2) Example Episode

The All-For-Nots (4)

The Moment Of Truth (3)

The Return of Jezebel James (2)

The Simpsons (10)

‘Til Death (5)

Unhitched (3)

The coverage is not what we’d like, but we’re working on the problem.
TV caption files are often in a format that either cannot be easily
parsed by our content team or that does not have the right timings to
synchronize with the version of the show that is streamed (pre-roll
timings are off, ad break durations are shorter online, etc). Our goal
is to improve our coverage.

Thanks,

Eugene

13 thoughts on “Closed Captioned Internet Videos on Hulu”

  1. Thanks for posting this, Bill! Also: the list will make it a little easier to decide what to watch on my lunch breaks. 🙂

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  4. Hey Bill,

    Thank you so much for the list, I have been using it as a guide to what is captioned and what is not. Did you get this list from Hulu.com or did you manually find out yourself which shows has captions?

    Is there anyway this list could be updated again? I’ve noticed there’s quite a few other shows that are captioned on Hulu.com such as The Office, and 30 days.

    Also are there any captioned movies on Hulu.com?

    Thank you Bill,
    Joe

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  5. I did that research myself.

    You should submit comments to their team to support a listing cc.
    I already have. They have responded to other comments, so they do listen.

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  6. Bill,

    Took your advice and emailed Hulu’s support services, basically they’re working on an option that will let you filter closed captioned media. Also they have an option where you can edit in your profile to turn on the captions always. Here’s the email that I got from Rebecca at Hulu:

    Hi Joe,
    We know how important it is to offer captioning and we’re working toward providing a more robust selection. We’ve found that the existing software that provides captioning for online video isn’t up to par with our standards, so we’re relying on our content partners to provide captioning info while we seek out other possibilities.

    And we’ve received a lot of requests for a way to filter for captioned videos. We’re planning to implement a feature that will make it easy to identify closed captioned videos in the near future, as part of other site improvements we have in the works.

    In the meantime, we recently created an option that allows you to set closed captioning as a default whenever it’s available. You can turn this setting on from your Hulu profile page, just go to “privacy and settings.” We discussed this in our blog on Friday:

    http://blog.hulu.com/2008/8/9/adjust-your-video-playback-settings.

    Best,
    Rebecca
    Hulu

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  7. Yay Hulu!

    And good work on the contact Joe!

    I think one of the keys to getting these things accomplished, is to show that we are paying attention when they do right, and requesting en masse when it’s needed to show demand!

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