This bulletin, CEA-CEB10-A, complements EIA-708-B, Digital Television Closed Captioning, providing additional guidance for those implementing EIA-708-B. CEA-CEB10-A also provides recommendations concerning implementation of EIA-708-B that are intended to ensure consistent encoder and decoder operations. In addition, EIA-708-B is silent on some issues that have arisen during implementation. CEACEB10- A provides guidance on those issues, drawing from referenced and related standards.

CEA-CEB10-A is intended to be a technical guide for encoding equipment and/or decoding equipment for advanced closed captioning based upon EIA-708-B. It is also a usage guide for producing captioning using such equipment.

Where recommendations are made for service providers, they apply to anyone who creates, transmits, or modifies data, i.e., someone other than an equipment manufacturer. For example, a "caption service provider" could be the agency that creates the captions for a program, the network that carries the captions, or the local affiliate that uses its own data encoder to insert captions.

CEA-CEB10-A is divided into sections, which concentrate on technical issues and which deal with different aspects of usage.

Familiarity with all CEA-CEB10-A sections is recommended to avoid unintentionally degrading caption services.

Each CEA-CEB10-A section references a related section of EIA-708-B or, in some instances, another related standard. A discussion of that section follows, and a recommendation offering additional guidance is provided.