Channel 4 inquiry over lost subtitles

OFCOM IS to investigate Channel 4 after an extended outage of its subtitle services last year.

The broadcaster experienced a number of major problems from September, caused by issues at the centre that handles its playout services.

Its subtitling, signing and audio descriptions were among those affected, prompting the National Deaf Children’s Society to call for regulatory action.

Ofcom said Channel 4 had fallen short of its subtitling quota on Freesat, a subscription-free satellite TV service offering more than 170 TV and radio channels.

A statement from the media watchdog said: “We have found that Channel 4 managed to meet the statutory requirement to subtitle 90 per cent of its programme hours over 2021 on most programmes. It also met its requirements for audio description and signing.

“However, Channel 4 fell short of its subtitling quota on Freesat, a satellite TV platform used by around two million UK homes.”

The issues arose in September after a fire-suppression system was triggered at the broadcast centre of Red Bee Media, severely damaging a large number of hard disks in a variety of systems.

The “extended outage” of Channel 4’s broadcast channels was not fully resolved until November 19.

Ofcom “remains very concerned” about the incident, which it said resulted in a “lengthy outage to Channel 4’s access services provision and also wider disruption to its general broadcasts on all platforms”.

A statement from Channel 4 said: “We apologise for the significant impact the Red Bee Media incident had on our access services.”

Channel 4 said it had “thoroughly reviewed the resilience of our systems”.