On September 29, 2021, Pluto TV's parent ViacomCBS agreed to pay $3.5 million and enter into a consent decree with the FCC to provide clear and accessible closed captioning, which would often not be passed down to the consumer via Pluto TV apps or websites despite either being part of a program already or being captioned by the live programming provider. The FCC's determined the service had not implemented proper and visible settings to allow the passthrough of captions, removed captioning capabilities, and did not maintain email or telephone captioning support hotlines required by the FCC to address viewer complaints. Under FCC rules, all nonexempt full-length video programming delivered over the Internet must present closed captions if originally aired over American television with captioning, if the programming had previously been shown on television in the U.S. with captions. This effectively applies to most television programming created after 1984, along with the 1990 Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, which mandated a requirement for captions to be accessible on all but the smallest televisions.
