Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on TV: Lifelong Reading for a Billion
MLC Vanguard | Created by PlanetRead
Inescapable and lifelong reading literacy on TV for 1 billion viewers, including 600 million weak-readers, by marrying Same Language Subtitling (SLS) with mainstream entertainment.
70,000,000 Lives Impacted
Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling mainstream entertainment on TV in the “same” language as the audio. What you hear is what you read. For example, Hindi films and serials with the dialog and songs, subtitled in Hindi; Tamil content subtitled in Tamil, and likewise on all existing Indian language content on TV.
There is compelling evidence that: a) SLS on A-V content causes automatic and inescapable reading engagement and b) measurable skill improvement among weak-readers.
A billion TV viewers in India watch on average, 3h 46m of TV, every day (FICCI-EY, 2019). 70% of the content watched is General Entertainment Content (GEC), or films, serials, and song-based programming. PlanetRead and IIM-A have conducted and published a number of multi-year SLS pilot studies on TV, in eight languages/states, to find that regular SLS exposure over 3-5 years is sufficient to transition a beginning decoder to functional and even fluent reading skills. Based on these pilot studies, our policy advocacy over two decades succeeded in getting SLS accepted in national broadcast policy. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting passed a policy in September 2019 requiring SLS on 50% of GEC content by 2025, in all languages and on all 800+ TV channels. The policy is yet to be implemented systematically by state and private TV channels. Having advocated for SLS policy over 15 years, a case built on evidence, our immediate goal now is to catalyze system-wide implementation of SLS in all languages. To do so, our current goal is to implement SLS in one language across all TV channels in India, thus, demonstrating its full impact on reading skills. When the policy on SLS is implemented on all TV channels, in all languages, it will give daily reading practice to a billion TV viewers, including 600 million weak readers, for 2 hours every day. Besides TV, we are also advocating for the extension of the SLS policy to all content hosted on Video-On-Demand (VOD) platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar/Disney in India and globally, in all languages. The history of VOD platforms is that they have only implemented captioning/SLS after it was either legislated or there was a legal challenge that led to a settlement and accommodation. This is the reason why all English content has English captions/SLS on VOD platforms, an outcome of a legal challenge in the US. The feature is now available globally in English.
The Innovation
SLS is a deceptively simple and positively disruptive solution to India's seemingly intractable weak-reading challenge. India has one billion TV viewers, including 600 million weak-readers. The average Indian watches 3 hours and 46 minutes (EY-FICCI, 2019) of TV a day, in a mix of 20+ languages. Since SLS is proven to cause inescapable reading engagement, even among weak readers, implementing it on films and serials, on the dialog and songs, is a sure way to give a billion viewers daily and lifelong reading practice at home.
Effectively, SLS on mainstream TV entertainment makes it rather difficult for anyone who has attended school and picked up some letter decoding ability, to remain a weak-reader. This is especially relevant for girls and women who need easy access to reading engagement. No additional cost in terms of time, resources, or behavior change is required for lifelong reading from SLS.
A good number of studies support a wide implementation of SLS on TV in India for 3 national goals:
1) raise the reading skills of 600 million weak-reading viewers,
2) improve the language skills of a billion viewers, and
3) provide media access to 65 million Deaf and Hard of hearing persons.
SLS overcomes two very difficult challenges of reading at scale in India:
1) making reading engaging and available in a large number of languages
2) keeping a weak-reader motivated over a sustained and long period, to persist with reading
About PlanetRead
PlanetRead is a not-for-profit with the vision of a planet where everyone can read and have access to interesting and affordable reading opportunities in native and any other language(s) of interest. This vision is built around its core innovation, Same Language Subtitling (SLS), and a mission to implement SLS on audio-visual content already watched with a passion by millions of people, in every country, in locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally important languages. PlanetRead's mission is translated into a strategy toward evidence-based-policy making and adoption of SLS on entertainment TV programming and the rapidly growing Video-On-Demand (VOD), digital platforms.
PlanetRead along with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad have implemented and published several multi-year TV pilot studies of SLS in eight Indian languages (2002-present). This has led to a national policy mandating SLS on 50% of all entertainment programming on TV in India, by 2025. Building on the potential of SLS for reading, language learning, and media access, PlanetRead further innovated the 'AniBook' or animated stories with SLS to massively scale up children's reading in any language(s), on any screen. PlanetRead and BookBox, a social enterprise born from PlanetRead's work, have collaborated to produce over 100 AniBooks in a mix of 50+ languages. An eye-tracking study in government schools in Rajasthan and an impact study of regular AniBook exposure in government schools in Delhi have found evidence of automatic reading practice and skill improvement among children in the early grades.
