I have added Ars Technica and Lifehacker to my list of blogs that I follow.
Today, they have both added content that relates to one story: Netflix will stream video over Wii. The Lifehacker version is here and the Ars Technica is here.
Both blogs discuss the technology behind it and what is being proposed.
I don’t have a wii, but this definitely would make me consider getting one because I love video games in addition to movies. And, let’s be honest here: I’m a Nintendo fanboy. I grew up playing SNES and I’d rather play Super Smash Bros Brawl than Call of Duty.
However, Netflix has historically been slow in adopting closed-captioning for its services, especially its streaming. I did not blog about this because it predates this blog, so I will mention it here.
In its official blog, as of June 2009, Netflix said that “Captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away.” You can read the blog post here.
They then go on to explain how “difficult” the captioning technology is to implement.
I got two messages from this blog post:
A. Apparently they care more about the users who are annoyed that they cannot turn off the captions than the users who cannot access their content due to the fact that they can’t turn on the captioning. I don’t understand this because hearing people can still understand the content with closed-captioning turned on – heck, I know lots of hearing people who enjoy it because they can understand mumbled phrases better. Deaf people cannot access the content if it is not closed-captioned.
B. In the same vein: I doubt that the technology is that difficult to implement, but even if it were that difficult, the fact that they expect us to wait another year for access to their content really shows that they don’t care enough to devote people to the task of programming the technology.
So, as it stands today, Netflix doesn’t provide captioning for its streamed content.
Since this is basically a migration of streaming video from the computer to the wii, I really doubt that they will have closed captioning. No conclusive data yet, though. I’ll research and update this blog when I find out.
