Ofcom finds Channel 4 breached licence conditions over subtitle problems

20 Jun 2022 10:47 AM

An Ofcom investigation has found Channel 4 breached the conditions of its broadcast licence following an extended outage of its subtitling, signing and audio description services.

These ‘access services’ are relied on by millions of people to watch and listen to television, including those who are deaf, have hearing loss, are blind or partially sighted.

Our investigation found that, as a result of an incident at a broadcast centre run by Red Bee Media, Freesat audiences who rely on subtitles were unable to fully access Channel 4 programmes for nearly two months.

Given this prolonged outage, the Channel 4 service fell short of the statutory requirement to subtitle 90% of its programme hours over 2021 on the Freesat service. Ofcom also found that Channel 4 breached another condition of its licence by failing to effectively communicate with affected audiences about the availability of access services in the weeks following the incident.

Our broader review of the broadcast centre incident has highlighted an urgent need for all broadcasters to improve and audit their disaster recovery plans. These must include clear communications plans in case of interruptions to services, which take into account different audiences and their particular needs.

What happened

In September 2021, Red Bee Media suffered a catastrophic failure at its West London broadcast centre following a release of fire-suppressant gas. This release caused a loud shockwave that damaged many of the servers beyond repair and required disaster recovery procedures to be activated.

The incident caused significant disruption to several broadcasters’ operations, including their access services. 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 received around 500 complaints and launched an investigation earlier this year.

What we found

Our broader review of the broadcast centre incident found that Channel 4’s ability to respond to the technology failure at Red Bee was not sufficiently resilient, given its back-up subtitling system failed. 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.

Broadcasters must also make audiences aware of the availability of access services. But we found serious failings and delays in Channel 4’s communications with affected audiences:

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 broadcast and on-demand programmes.

Lessons to be learned for all broadcasters

We recognise that the incident at Red Bee was unprecedented. It resulted in a lengthy outage to Channel 4’s access services provision and also wider disruption to its general broadcasts on all platforms. A number of other broadcasters were also affected, though to a lesser degree.

We have today also published our findings following a thorough review of the incident and made a number of recommendations that we expect broadcasters to act on, including:

We are reviewing our TV Technical Codes later this year and are considering what changes may be needed to shore up the delivery of access services, to bring them into line with sound and vision.

When things go wrong, broadcasters must have plans in place to restore important services, but also to let audiences know what they can expect. By failing to do this, Channel 4 let down people who use subtitles, signing or audio description to enjoy programmes.

"There are a number of lessons for broadcasters to learn from this incident. We've told them they must improve and test their back-up plans and infrastructure to minimise the risk of such a disruptive outage happening again.

Kevin Bakhurst, Ofcom’s Group Director for Broadcasting

BSL summaries of these publications are available on Ofcom’s website .

Notes to editors

Despite the autumn outage, Channel 4 met the statutory requirement to subtitle 90% of its programme hours over 2021 on other television platforms – largely by overperforming outside of the outage period. The broadcaster also met its annual requirements for audio description and signing for the Channel 4 service on all television platforms. Channel 4 Corporation’s other channels, such as E4 and More 4, have a lesser requirement to provide 80% of programming with subtitles which they met across all platforms.