Closed-Captioning made Mandatory
Closed-Captioning was enforced by the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996. As a result, the “CC” policy was enforced in January 2006. In addition, there will be many stations with strict CC requirements. Make sure you find out the station’s CC pre-requisites or your infomercials may be rejected.
In January 2006, the FCC required all programming broadcasters to provide at least 450 hours of closed-captioned material per yearly quarter, or 5 hours of closed-captioning per day. If the station you are submitting to is already satisfying the 450 hour quota, then you do not have to worry about adding CCs on your project. If your project is less than 5 minutes in length or is airing between the hours of 2am and 6am, you also do not have to worry about Closed-Captions.
There’s even better news for first-time markets. If the station you will be airing on is making less than 3 million dollars of annual revenue, you do not have to submit Closed-Captions.
Nevertheless, if all signs point to Closed-Captions, it really isn’t the end of the world. The closed-captioning process isn’t as complicated or expensive as you may think. There are some companies that will make the conversion for as little as $400 to $1000 per half hour shows. The process of captioning and encoding generally takes about 5-7 days.
Advantages of Closed-Captioning
The National Captioning Institute research show that the closed-caption market includes 24 million individuals who are either deaf or hearing impaired.
From that pool of consumers, there are 3.7 million remedial readers, 27 million illiterate adults who are learning to read and 30 million people who are learning to speak and read English.
This means that the total additional population closed-captioned DRTV programmingmay reach is 84.7 million TV viewers.
The National Captioning Institute also reports that 66 percent of this market is more likely to buy products advertised with captions, 53 percent makes a special effort to look for products advertised with captions and 35 percent will change brands to buy a product advertised with captions instead of one that is not.
Closed-Captioned Infomercials may also reach viewers in noisy places where it may otherwise impossible to hear the content of the programming.
Do you need marketing for your Product?
If you are looking for a infomercial production company with a long track record of successful outings on Television, contact GoDRTV at 800.507.0159 or shoot us an email at info@GoDRTV.
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