Ofcom consultation on making on-demand services accessible
In 2018 Ofcom made recommendations to Government regarding access services requirements for ODPS. It has now provided more details, and opened a consultation on its proposed methodologies for determining exemptions.
Ofcom has recommended to Government that ODPS (regulated video platforms) be required to meet access service requirements over a four-year period. These are: 80 per cent of programming to include subtitles, 10 per cent audio description, and 5 per cent signing
Ofcom has outlined three exemption criteria, and has opened these up for consultation:
COBA believes that Ofcom’s affordability exemption criteria (i.e. if the cost of implementing services is greater than 1 per cent of total turnover) will mean that certain platforms will have to comply even if they make little or no profit from their online video services
COBA commissioned O&O to suggest a means of estimating “relevant turnover”, which could be used instead of “total turnover”
We developed two potential approaches and shared these with COBA members for comments on their suitability and practicality. Following conversations we COBA members these were refined and are presented in this report
Click here to read the report in full.