Sky Television in New Zealand did it. They listened to us, the Deaf and hearing impaired people of New Zealand, and went ahead and captioned 13 of their channels for us. They did this without any Government funding, and with no legislation in place. They have my greatest respect and I hope yours as well. There are another 5 channels in the pipeline for captioning as well, in the near future. I think this is the most exciting thing to happen in the Television arena for years.
To find out all about it, head to the Sky Television website to learn what you need and how to turn them on. At present all the captioning content is available on the basic subscription. We have asked them to consider a captioning subscription and we will let you know if this becomes available.
The available channels with captioning are:
- Animal Planet
- Disney
- Disney Junior
- TCM
- Cartoon Network
- Crime Investigator
- Discovery
- Nick
- UKTV
- National Geographic
- TVOne, Two and TV3
We will keep you posted with updates as they come to hand, not only with Sky but with captioning in general. If you have any questions, or feedback, just leave us a comment, or contact Sky directly.
Cheers from
The Captioning Work Group
Well said and congratulations.
I ordered Sky yesterday and I am looking forward to having it installed at home on Monday! Excitementness!
Absolutely brilliant news! So good to hear that they listened.
96 year old very hearing impaired client told me she would get Sky TV now
How about that that for new subscriber demographic
Julie
Audiologist
Auckland
Thanks for that feedback Julie – excellent news !
Well done to all of you who got this monumental change implemented! My name is Amanda Everitt and I have been involved in Captioning issues in New Zealand for some time before you and the group came in. Angela Sew Hoy and myself founded Captioning Access New Zealand and we brought in captioned movies into NZ for the first time ever, along with Deaf Aotearoa and the Motion Pictures Distribution Association. We also had close ties with TVNZ Captioning Centre. While I am no longer living in NZ, I am immensely proud of this achievement. There’s still more that needs to be done, but its a great start. You go!
hello to everyone,
we moved to NZ in Feb 2012, my husband is hearing impaired, we were very happy to know that there is subtitle, unfortunately, this is not working properly, the subtitle keep coming and desapearing, after few sentences that were said it will show up again, and again it will show one or two sentences and it cuts off again, very annoying as my husband’s English is also a second language he can’t understand anything, is it only our tv or other people have the same problem?
can we do anything to make it better?
thanks for any answer
When will Prime be subtitled?
Also when is TV3 going to subtitle Freeview HD so I can record programmes on TV via TiVo?
Have TVNZ considered bringing back the TV License we used to pay years ago and that money can go towards funding for subtitling for the deaf?
Hi Averil,
Currently, there is only funding for the free to air TV channels 1, 2 and 3. Prime has been applying for funding to NZon Air for set up costs, with no luck. We will be trying to encourage Prime to caption prime regardless of funding, but there is nothing in the foreseeable future as yet.
TV3 is already captioning Freeview HD as far as I am aware. You might like to join our facebook page ‘NZ Captioning Working Group’. TV3 has joined that page and you can get questions answered there if for some reason you can’t access captions through TiVo. I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you how to turn them on. Let me know if you can’t join the FB page for any reason and I’ll ask for you.
Licensing is something that TVNZ has not considered going back to and I doubt they will.
Cheers
Roby
Remind you all in the past the court has ruled that TV licence deem illegal taxes as I am very doubt this would be re-introduced one again as caption expand to other channel that would be great.
Hi Roby
Thanks for that – I do know that TV3 have got captioning on Digital but not sure about Freeview HD at this stage.
cheers Averil