An Ofcom investigation report, released on 20 June, found Channel 4 to be in breach of its broadcasting license as some programmes went almost two months without subtitles, sign language, or audio description.
On 25 September 2021, the fire-suppressant gas system was triggered at Red Bee Media, a broadcast centre that provides services such as subtitling for Channel 4, as well the BBC and Channel 5, destroying hard disks and affecting hundreds of hours of programming. Channel 4’s accessibility services were not fully restored until 19 November 2021, resulting in the channel subtitling only 85.41% of programming, falling short of its quota of 90%.
Ofcom also found that Channel 4’s disaster recovery measures were not suitably resilient, as the back-up system for subtitle also failed. It took a month for subtitles to be restored on Sky, Freeview, Youview, and Virgin Media, and another month for subtitles to be restored on Freesat.
By failing to effectively communicate with the affected audiences after the incident, Ofcom found Channel 4 to be in breach of another license condition, as no information about the outage was given to viewers for 12 days.
A review of the incident, conducted in the aftermath, has highlighted the need for all UK broadcasters to improve their resilience in the event of a disaster or outage. Channel 4 has been tasked with reporting their improvements and progress in this regard to Ofcom by the end of 2022. They must also demonstrate continued improvements for accessibility of their programming.
A statement from Ofcom said: “We have found that Channel 4 managed to meet the statutory requirement to subtitle 90% 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.”
A statement from Channel 4 said: “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.”
“Channel 4 would like to reassure our audiences that we have thoroughly reviewed the resilience of our systems to ensure that such a catastrophic event cannot harm our ability to deliver these essential services in the future.”