In a recent webinar, Netflix, the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), and 3Play Media discussed the best practices for closed captioning the digital distribution of TV and film.

The webinar was inspired by the EMA Closed Captions Working Group, which is comprised of Amazon, Best Buy, Google, Microsoft, MovieLabs, Netflix, Rovi, Vudu, and the EMA. The group was created to develop closed captioning best practices for compliance with federal legal requirements.

With so many legal updates to closed captioning laws, the rules and standards reflected in this white paper are crucial moving forward. This white paper is a summation of the webinar discussion and covers legal updates, best practices proposed by the EMA Closed Captions Working Group, caption certification and exemptions, caption formats and frame rates, standards for transcription and captioning, industry trends, and technical standards for file formats, caption delivery, encoding, styling, and onscreen placement.