Hulu.com’s TV shows: subtitled or not?

March 12, 2008 7:42 pm

I have been waiting with great anticipation for the day when hulu.com would open their doors to the hordes who wanted to watch TV shows on the web. Their grand opening was today!

So far, I’m pretty impressed with the collection of TV shows that have been made available for viewing on Hulu.com. I could see myself watching a TV show on hulu.com if there was nothing good on TV.

Of course, the big question on my mind: Are the TV shows subtitled or not? As a Deaf person, I’m often frustrated by many media sites when the subtitling of video clips is not included in their workflow for the conversion from the original format into a format suitable for web consumption. Media companies, a note for you all: Subtitling a video clip is not difficult task to accomplish!

So far, Hulu.com has been a mixed blessing. I jumped across several shows until I came upon one of my favorite TV shows, The Simpsons. What did I see? A “CC” icon! I was able to watch an entire Simpsons episode online with subtitles! Hulu.com has taken several promising steps toward the subtitling of the video clips. I’m glad that they at least displayed a few clips with subtitles so we know they have already developed the capability. The next step for Hulu.com is to put up a guarantee that their conversion process will always include subtitles for all TV shows where available.

Here’s a captioned Simpson episode for you to watch! [move your mouse over the video, you'll see the CC icon and select 'English']

http://www.hulu.com/watch/9603/the-simpsons-love-springfieldian-style

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  • same with Red Lasso videos. They have CC logo button to click on to turn on captioning.

    http://redlasso.com

    Register and it will take few weeks to get invitation. It took me 2 weeks to get invited. Sure worth it!
  • I watched more closely and yes, the descriptive text is included! The subtitles are lifted from from the captioning text! This is great news.
  • I'm not sure about that yet. It seems to be the closed captioning text that was converted into subtitles. That would include the descriptive text such as [phone rings] to make sure Deaf people are aware of the sounds took place in the show.

    Canadians, you could switch your web browser to a proxy server here in USA to watch the shows.
  • When you say more like closed captioning, are you referring to descriptive text like [doorbell rings] , or as in captioning that is placed in different locations on the screen?
  • Neecy
    It looks fantastic but I sure wish it was available to us Canadians as well. I don't think there's anything that's comparable here in Canada. Sucks to be us.
  • Colin
    It's not available outside of US. :(

    I'm located in Vancouver, Canada.
  • Saw it and love it but grr at commercial!
  • Marvin Miller
    Yeah, I emailed them about it as well. I also asked them to make their captions like real closed captioning instead of subtitles. Here's their response:

    Hi Marvin,

    We have closed captioning for some of the videos in our catalog, and we're working on solutions to expand that coverage. You can tell that a video has closed captioning if it displays the cc button in the bottom pane of the player.

    Here's an example:
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/11259/the-simpsons-the-debarted

    Many of the closed captioning files maintained for broadcast have the wrong timings for online where black leader and commercial breaks are all placed differently. We're working on various solutions to improve this situation and are committed to solving it.

    Eugene

    On 3/8/08, Marvin Miller wrote:
    Please don't tell me that the deaf and hard of hearing community took another step
    backwards... is closed captioning feature coming?


    Marvin
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