I was thrilled by the announcement that Hulu.com, a long-planned site that showcases free movies and television content in both full length and short clips, had gone LIVE, and hundreds of episodes and films were now available. They describe themselves on the website as “a vast selection of premium video content, on demand, free and ad-supported: full episodes of TV shows, both current and classic, full-length movies, thousands of clips, and much more.” Further information in their ABOUT page states, “Hulu was founded in March 2007 and is a joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. In addition, Hulu has closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.”

Finally! a well funded, well-positioned company was positioning itself to make premium content available on the web. The availability of closed captions should be a no-brainer, right? Alas, in what should have turned out to be a long, happy night of exploration turned instead into sheer frustration and disgust as i discovered that only a tiny handful of the content has closed captions. A VERY TINY handful. To make matters worse, the only way to currently find out -what- content has captions, we have to start -each- episiode one-by-one and wait to see if captions appear. This is totally unacceptable!

We’re not talking about a small start-up pinching pennies because of dire lack of funds. We’re talking about a well-funded venture. As Hulu describes itself on the site, they intend to be “the web’s most comprehensive selection from more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S.”

Nor are we talking about a difficult-to-implement feature. Video on Hulu is Flash-based, meaning that captions CAN easily be incorporated.  Even old-fashioned Line-21 caption data can be ported to the web with CaptionKeeper.   There is simply NO excuse for this nonsense from Hulu.com.

This is not the first time that a large company with deep pockets filled with cash has dropped the ball. Arbofo recently discussed the failure of several studios to caption or subtitle it’s offerings, for example. When are these big companies going to get the message? Must we wait years for the FCC to take action like they finally did by mandating captioning capacity into television sets in 1993? Captioning is cheap, easy, and quickly done. What possibly hinders these companies besides outright disrespect for it’s deaf viewers? We shouldn’t have to wait til 2093 for the FCC to mandate closed captions on video web content from the television and film studios.

There are video sites that cater to the deaf, but they are severely limited in content. By now you’ve heard of Project ReadOn, a site with captioned content. It is great at what it does, but the fact remains, it’s a small, limited volunteer effort lacking funds and, more importantly, entertainment content from television and movie studios.  Other video projects are even smaller, and searches for finding captioned content on larger sites like Youtube and Blinkx are akin to playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

I have sent a letter of complaint to Hulu and encourage you to do the same. You can contact them at content@hulu.com and feedback@hulu.com

Let them know you’re angry about the lack of captions, and how that affects the nearly 28 million deaf and hard of hearing viewers they have ignored. Tell them that we deserve better, and that the captioned content they do presently have should be made much more obvious rather than forcing us to click on each item in their catalog to dig out the very few that actually have captions.