I’m not deaf but I use subtitles. A lot of the quality is really awful regardless. Some youtubers have better subtitle quality than TV
Key part, if you’re wondering how this actually happened, after decades of having subtitles:
“Hundreds of hours of Channel 4 programming were affected by the outage, which began when fire suppression devices destroyed hard disks at a west London broadcast centre last September.The incident at the centre, owned by Red Bee Media, affected other broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 5, although their services were restored sooner.Channel 4 was the worst affected, with an extended outage of its access services on its broadcast channels that began on 25 September 2021 and was not fully resolved until 19 November 2021.Ofcom found that Channel 4’s ability to respond to the technology failure at Red Bee was not sufficiently resilient, with its back-up subtitling system failing. It took four weeks for subtitles to be restored on Sky, Freeview, Youview and Virgin Media. It was another four weeks before subtitles were restored on Freesat.As a result, Channel 4 fell short of its annual quota to subtitle 90% of programmes on Freesat – achieving only 85.41% – in breach of its licence conditions.”
“Channel 4 did not provide any information about the cause of the outage or steps being taken to resolve it for 12 days following the incident.
On-screen TV guides included inaccurate information about the availability of Channel 4 access services until 14 October 2021, nearly three weeks after the outage began.
Deaf viewers were likely to be among those most impacted by the outage, but Channel 4 did not provide any information to viewers in British Sign Language until 15 October.
Nor did it broadcast any on-air advice or information about the outage until that date, when it issued a statement which read: “Channel 4 would like to apologise to viewers for not currently being able to provide access services. We realise how frustrating this is for our viewers.”
Audiences who did not have access to Channel 4’s online information would have had no understanding about the scale of the issues or that the company was working to rectify them.”
“Channel 4 must now report to Ofcom by the end of this year on the steps it has taken to ensure greater resilience of its access services, as well as how it is continuing to improve the accessibility of its programmes.
Ofcom said it recognised that the Red Bee incident was “unprecedented” but following its review, the watchdog has made a number of recommendations broadcasters are expected to act on.”
At least we can be sure nothing like this will ever happen if C4 is privatised /s
Quite right, an’ all!
To think, Channel 4 is deeply worried and scared about being privatised. They couldn’t even handle a basic problem faced by their subtitle division and it took bloody ages for them to finally get around to sorting it out.
The sooner they’re privatised, the better.
Plenty of blame to go around.
Red Bee Media for literally not having system back ups stored in a remote location away from West London resulting in them having to rebuild everything from scratch.
Also Channel 4 for having an inadequate fallback system in the event of a failure. Their disaster recovery system had all sorts of bugs, it was like it was from the mid 2000s. Everything kept crashing or just didn’t work at all. BBC had a fallback in Salford and Channel 5’s disaster recovery mode… kinda worked… better than C4 at least.
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I’m not deaf but I use subtitles. A lot of the quality is really awful regardless. Some youtubers have better subtitle quality than TV
Key part, if you’re wondering how this actually happened, after decades of having subtitles:
“Hundreds of hours of Channel 4 programming were affected by the outage, which began when fire suppression devices destroyed hard disks at a west London broadcast centre last September.The incident at the centre, owned by Red Bee Media, affected other broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 5, although their services were restored sooner.Channel 4 was the worst affected, with an extended outage of its access services on its broadcast channels that began on 25 September 2021 and was not fully resolved until 19 November 2021.Ofcom found that Channel 4’s ability to respond to the technology failure at Red Bee was not sufficiently resilient, with its back-up subtitling system failing. It took four weeks for subtitles to be restored on Sky, Freeview, Youview and Virgin Media. It was another four weeks before subtitles were restored on Freesat.As a result, Channel 4 fell short of its annual quota to subtitle 90% of programmes on Freesat – achieving only 85.41% – in breach of its licence conditions.”
“Channel 4 did not provide any information about the cause of the outage or steps being taken to resolve it for 12 days following the incident.
On-screen TV guides included inaccurate information about the availability of Channel 4 access services until 14 October 2021, nearly three weeks after the outage began.
Deaf viewers were likely to be among those most impacted by the outage, but Channel 4 did not provide any information to viewers in British Sign Language until 15 October.
Nor did it broadcast any on-air advice or information about the outage until that date, when it issued a statement which read: “Channel 4 would like to apologise to viewers for not currently being able to provide access services. We realise how frustrating this is for our viewers.”
Audiences who did not have access to Channel 4’s online information would have had no understanding about the scale of the issues or that the company was working to rectify them.”
“Channel 4 must now report to Ofcom by the end of this year on the steps it has taken to ensure greater resilience of its access services, as well as how it is continuing to improve the accessibility of its programmes.
Ofcom said it recognised that the Red Bee incident was “unprecedented” but following its review, the watchdog has made a number of recommendations broadcasters are expected to act on.”
At least we can be sure nothing like this will ever happen if C4 is privatised /s
Quite right, an’ all!
To think, Channel 4 is deeply worried and scared about being privatised. They couldn’t even handle a basic problem faced by their subtitle division and it took bloody ages for them to finally get around to sorting it out.
The sooner they’re privatised, the better.
Plenty of blame to go around.
Red Bee Media for literally not having system back ups stored in a remote location away from West London resulting in them having to rebuild everything from scratch.
Also Channel 4 for having an inadequate fallback system in the event of a failure. Their disaster recovery system had all sorts of bugs, it was like it was from the mid 2000s. Everything kept crashing or just didn’t work at all. BBC had a fallback in Salford and Channel 5’s disaster recovery mode… kinda worked… better than C4 at least.