Why didn't the closed captioning team have access to the Super Bowl halftime show song lyrics?
At our house, we had closed captioning on for the Superbowl LI halftime show. We noted that the closed captioning was quite a bit behind the words being sung by Lady Gaga (as is typical when the team is typing them live), and there were some mistakes as well (at one point "This land is your land" was rendered as "This LAPD is your land").
In a few shots, I could see an LED screen in the stadium that had the song lyrics perfectly syncronized with the songs. This made me wonder: why weren't these same song lyrics, perfectly timed, given to the closed captioning team? The halftime show has been planned for some time and, as the LED screen in the stadium showed, the synchronized song lyrics were prepared. They likely knew for a few days at least what the final order of the sets were, and of course the words to the songs.
So why wasn't the closed captioning team given access to these synchronized song lyrics (perhaps a few days beforehand) so that they wouldn't have to generate them live?
Best Answer
Basically, because people aren't perfect
As you already mentioned, live events are captioned in real time
Some shows are captioned in real time. That is, during a live broadcast of a special event or of a news program, captions appear just a few seconds behind the action to show what is being said. A stenographer listens to the broadcast and types the words into a special computer program that adds the captions to the television signal. The typists have to be skilled at dictation and spelling and they have to be very fast and accurate at typing.
Live sporting events are still captured by paid stenographers and any time you have a human being involved, there is a chance of imperfection. They still have to caption everything in real time and it's likely that the captioner simple wasn't given access to Lady Gaga's set list.
Update: They were prepared for Lady Gaga
The Superbowl captioning services were provided by VITAC and in a blog post they mentioned:
VITAC production coordinators will also be busy preparing Lady Gaga’s song lyrics ahead of time for the captioner, to ensure they can be enjoyed by all.
So it would appear that even with preparation, there is still an element of human error will come through when captioning is provided in real time.
There is no specific mention of why they couldn't coordinate with the lyrics being shown in the stadium, but my best guess is that Lady Gaga's technical team wasn't asked for it due to the nature of it being a live event and VITAC's confidence in their steno team.
If I find anything else I'll add more.
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Answer 2
Imagine, for a moment, if Lady Gaga had gone off the deep end and decided to make a stage with the largest television viewership of the year. Her team, doing the lyrics on the board, could have thrown in "F-Trump!" and that would have been blared out to all the CC people of the world.
You absolutely have to monitor that stuff live, and have the stenographers censor anything offensive. You can't rely on automation for that, because then you're susceptible to FCC fines, as well as any backlash from the mainstream. And the NFL is very particular about the way their $200B business is perceived.
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