The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in U.S District Court of Massachusetts. The NAD feels that Netflix has violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captions for most of its “watch instantly” move and television content.

There are over 36 million Americans alone who are deaf or hard of hearing. According to the National Association of the Deaf, many of these people have already brought this issue to the attention of Netflix by sending letters, writing blogs and signing petitions that urge the site to provide equal access to its streaming content. The group says that Netflix, despite all of the complaints and requests by NAD members, has so far only set up captions on a small number of the overall titles on its “watch instantly” service.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that “places of entertainment” provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities, says NAD. They are asking the court to declare Netflix in violation of the Act and are hoping the court orders the company to provide captions on all streaming content. NAD President Bobbie Beth Scoggins made this statement:

“We have tried for years to persuade Netflix to do the right thing and provide equal access to all content across all platforms. They chose not to serve our community on an equal basis; we must have equal access to the biggest provider of streamed entertainment. As Netflix itself acknowledges, streamed video is the future and we must not be left out.”

There is some question as to whether or not Netflix has truly been ignoring this community’s need and it should be interesting to see what comes to light during this case. In a blog post back in February (long before the lawsuit), Neil Hunt, the company’s chief product officer, said that about 30% of the streaming content available at Netflix had subtitles available and that he expected to see an increase of up to 80% by the end of this year. Much earlier, in a blog post from 2009, Hunt had suggested that there were technical difficulties challenging their progress with subtitles.

The NAD lawsuit contends that the process of captioning is both technically possible and relatively simple to achieve.
It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on this case. Netflix is not a traditional “place” such as a video store you can walk into or a theater. So does it constitute a place of entertainment under the law? Netflix is an online business and one has to wonder if the courts will rule that it comes under the jurisdiction of the ADA or not. Either way, one certainly hopes they endeavor to make all of their products easily accessible to the NAD community.

The Opera Unite application Stream Media seemed to offer a better solution, especially from a usability point of view.

It turned out that it worked much like previously reviewed Orb but without the need to run additional software (but Opera).

All that is needed to stream video contents is to have a portable or installed version of Opera at hand that supports Opera Unite (all the latest releases do).

Stream Media can then be installed by visiting the application’s page at the Opera Unite website and clicking on the install application button. The registration of an Opera Unite account is required. The process is however very user friendly as it can be created directly after clicking the install application button and without verifications of any kind.

A single folder can be selected to be offered for video streaming. Stream Media supports many different media formats:

flv, mp3, swf, aif, aiff, aac, au, bmp, gsm, mov, mid, midi, mpg, mpeg, mp4, m4a, psd, qt, qtif, qif, qti, snd, tif, tiff, wav, 3g2, 3gp, ra, ram, rm, rpm, rv, smi, smil, asx, asf, avi, wma, wmv

All supported video and audio files are then available for streaming and download. The user who wants to access the media can open the url of the Opera Unite application in a web browser to access the contents. The administrator can change the visibility of the contents and add a password protection so that only trusted users can access the contents.

Stream Media is one of the easiest ways to stream video and audio files to friends and other users. It takes approximately two minutes to setup and there is no additional firewall or router configuration to be made to get it running properly.

Stream Media can be downloaded from the Opera Unite website.

NewTeeVee has a list of countries that are blocked currently taken from the Wikipedia entry. If you do the math you notice that many countries are still missing on that list. If you sum it up you could say that access is blocked for most countries in Africa, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

The first reason that was given to the public was that access was blocked due to a low concentration of users in those countries. According to official sources all blocked countries accounted for 10% of the Veoh user base. It probably makes sense from a business point of view to concentrate on markets that provide a large enough user base to be attractive to advertisers but the way the news was transmitted to the user base was rather unprofessional.

I suppose you could still try and access Veoh using a virtual private network connection like Hotspot Shield if you really wanted to.

Update on Vreel: (received via email)

The vreel servers were hosted in Houston’s DC1 datacenter, owned by the planet – which caught fire on saturday :)
Following a flurry of failed repairs, theplanet has finally agreed under immense pressure to move our servers to another datacenter.
We should be back up shortly, and are about ready to enter open beta.