How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good: So though a 22-minute show takes hours to caption, and though my ears are hot when I remove my headphones for a break, my work is a handful of kilobits, encoded in ASCII — which is a language agreed to by a consortium to be an OK way to capture English in the lingua that’s the most franca of all: binary. So many on-screen dramatic worlds shriveled down to alpha-numerics.
But this digital load-bearing has its limits. Regardless what is said in any show, the CW cannot overload the viewer, who is after all, a reader. Adults shows must cap at 255 wpm max, children’s programming much less at 160.
But this digital load-bearing has its limits. Regardless what is said in any show, the CW cannot overload the viewer, who is after all, a reader. Adults shows must cap at 255 wpm max, children’s programming much less at 160.