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ABC slips up with captioning

ACMA finds the ABC in breach of the Broadcasting Services Act for failing to caption Q&A and Lateline.

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The media watchdog has determined that the ABC failed to provide captions for two Q & A and Lateline broadcasts in Queensland in March.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority found ABC breached the Broadcasting Services Act for not providing captions on March 26th in the Queensland region.

National broadcasters must provide captions for programmes on primary channels between 6pm and 10:30pm and for News and Current Affairs programmes regardless of time.

In its submission to ACMA, ABC acknowledged that there was a caption delivery failure.

In a statement it said, “The failure occurred after the ABC installed new servers to handle recording and delayed replay of programs which are broadcast live in some states and territories, but provided on delay to those states and territories which are on different time zones (such as Queensland in summertime). Unfortunately the caption line was out of sync and so captions did not pass. The server was rebooted and this corrected the problem.

“The problem on 26 March was experienced only by viewers in delay states…

“The ABC’s Broadcast Operations have advised that there have been no further incidents with the servers and their expectation is that this particular fault will not recur.”

3 Responses

  1. So ACMA can make a decision about something the ABC has done wrong in a little over 6 months, but how long does it take to bring down decisions upon the commercial networks? A fair bit longer from memory **rolls eyes**

    And then what happens anyway? Nothing. I sometimes wonder why ACMA bothers at all…

  2. I’m not someone who relies on captioning, but it seems unfair that outside 6pm-10:30pm and news captioning isn’t required.

    Surely it’s not that expensive with modern technology, and most programs aren’t live so the captioning could be done ahead of actual broadcast.

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