24 Sep 2015

Captioning for live TV will not be mandatory says government

4:45 pm on 24 September 2015

Captioning for live television will not be made mandatory, the government says.

Thousands of deaf and hard-of-hearing New Zealanders will miss out on television captioning for the Rugby World Cup because of technical problems.

Nikki Kaye, speaking for the broadcasting minister said there was currently no facility between the overseas broadcaster and Sky to create a live captioned feed for the competition.

She said making captioning mandatory would put a lot of extra costs on broadcasters and the level of captioning for free-to-air programmes had more than tripled over the past decade.