What are the requirements for Closed-Captioning?
Closed captioning must comply with the FCC’s rule, 47 C.F.R. section 15.122. See NTIA Technical Appendix I, Specification #17. Paragraph (a)(2) of the FCC rule requires that “DTV converter boxes that allow digitally transmitted television signals to be displayed on analog receivers shall pass available analog caption information to the attached receiver in a form recognizable by that receiver’s built-in caption decoder circuitry.” Paragraph (b) requires that DTV receivers and tuners be capable of decoding captioning information delivered pursuant to EIA-708-B; however, Report and Order FCC 00-259, which generated these requirements, makes it clear that the requirement to decode EIA 708 captions does not apply to converter boxes. Per paragraphs 48 through 51 of that order (http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-00-259A1.pdf), converter boxes are required only to encode the EIA-608 captions onto line 21 of the analog video output; creation of captions by the converter box
