“I know quite a few people who, like me, have become disabled in the prime of their lives. I served in Iraq, came home last year with permanent damage to my hearing. I can still enjoy films with a little ‘assistance’. In this case, subtitles. I only go to the cinema now if the film is subtitled. Thankfully most are these days”

Industry Coordination

The deliberative nature of SMPTE doesn’t lend itself to dealing with the quick pace of events on the ground, or interfacing with manufacturers to help solve the problems that studios and exhibitors were having in the field. In 2006 a group was set up to facilitate the required discussions while not exposing the participants to anti-trust laws. The monthly meetings of the InterSociety Digital Cinema Forum (ISDCF) allowed a world-wide group of technical staff from the studios, manufacturers and exhibitors to work together for that purpose. Members of this group monitored the pain and progress that lead to InterOp changes and suggestions to SMPTE.

Dealing with caption data and assisted listening tracks became a significant part of those changing ad hoc needs. The change of legacy 8 channel analog setups to 16 channels of user-mapped digital audio was debated with draft documents, a separate committee, re-submissions, and requests for comments that lasted many months. Some files would also be in the secure/encrypted space, so special equipment interface specifications also needed development. Even deciding which channels to place the HI and VI-N tracks (for the Hearing Impaired channel and Visual Impaired-Narration channel) took months. 

In 2008, NATO asked the ISDCF to put a special focus on the issues of the accessibility technology. The studio technicians had been pushing the topic earlier, but the interlocking “foundation before structure” nature of all the standards and specification requirements made prioritizing difficult.

A special April 2009 ISDCF meeting was held, requested by NATO, to push for exactly that prioritizing. Their presentation was meant to make certain everyone was aware of the needs, and the pressure that the exhibition industry was facing – a public that was not going to stay as patient as the engineers tasked with handling dozens of issues and 100% workability. 

Projector and media server manufacturers gave reports about the transitions they were going through as they approached the goal of SMPTE Compliance. Delays from one key group developing their Series II equipment would have ripple effects impacting captions and narration tracks since new levels of security meant no company could test interfaces until all the main chips were ready. 

It was at this meeting that the ISDCF took responsibility for prioritizing access issues, by organizing the first of what turned into a series of plugfests – multi-day gatherings of manufacturing engineers, their equipment and current or experimental software/firmware – to facilitate the exchange of data (and problems) toward making common interfaces work together. 

The plugfests worked well for improving the technology. They also worked well as a means for showing the state of the equipment. People in the industry got to see equipment working that they had only heard about. At the first plugfest, Doremi and USL showed preview versions of what was later sold as the Doremi CaptiView and the USL CSS seat mounted private closed captioning systems. USL also showed an early prototype of a glasses-based closed caption viewing system that used an extension of their standard audio emitter system. 

Representatives from legal teams and advocacy groups attended the first plugfest. How well the invited audience understood the dozens of back room hours by dozens of people for two days to get everything working was not polled. But the event proved quite valuable to the manufacturers for discovering and working out details and forcing focus. A plugfest has been held every 3 to 6 months since then.