Ofcom has ruled Channel 4 breached its broadcast licence conditions after outrage over its subtitle services and lack of communication.
Last year, the broadcaster experienced a number of major problems for a number of months, caused by issues at the centre which handles its playout services. It was found Channel 4 "fell short" of the statutory requirement to subtitle 90% of its programme hours over 2021 on the Freesat service.
In September 2021, Red Bee Media suffered a "catastrophic failure" following a release of fire-suppressant gas, severely damaging a large number of hard disks in a variety of systems. The incident caused significant disruption to several broadcasters’ operations, including their access services.
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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 confirmed it received around 500 complaints and launched an investigation earlier this year.
The media watchdog stated it also found the broadcaster had breached another licence condition by "failing to effectively communicate" with those affected audiences following the incident.
A statement from Ofcom said: "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."
Following the incident, the broadcasting watchdog has insisted broadcasters must improve their disaster recovery plans and preparing communications for service interruptions.
In response to the Ofcom investigation, Channel 4 released a statement on Monday, June 20, which read: "Channel 4 is very disappointed with Ofcom’s decision and will review its findings carefully. We would like to apologise once again to our audiences for the disruption to our access services following the catastrophic incident last September and since then we have implemented a number of new systems and processes to avoid a serious incident in the future."
Ofcom added it will be reviewing its 'TV Technical Codes' later this year where it will consider what changes are needed to bring the delivery of access services in line with sound and vision protocols. Kevin Bakhurst, Ofcom's group director for broadcasting, said: "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."
The broadcaster noted that its commitments for 2022 include returning to 100% subtitled content across all its linear channels, and on its on-demand service All 4 by the end of the year. It is also aiming to increase the amount of signing on Channel 4 and E4 as well as upping the audio descriptions on linear channels.
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