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10 Melbourne in breach over caption fails

ACMA finds 10 captions were delayed, inaccurate, missing or repeated, making comprehension difficult for some viewers.

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More network breaches of the Broadcasting Services Act have been issued by the media watchdog due to poor captioning.

The Australian Communications Media & Authority ruled Network 10 Melbourne in breach for failing to supply comprehendible captions for to deaf and hearing impaired viewers.

Two broadcasts of 10 News First in April 2020 did not meet an industry standard, although a complainant advised issues had been ongoing for two months.

“For about 2 months now the captions on this service have been faulty,” they told ACMA. “The captions are corrupted and unreadable. I have not been able to contact Channel 10 directly as they seem to make it almost impossible for anyone to find phone numbers or email addresses for them.”

After examining two broadcasts ACMA found multiple problems including captioning delay, confusing colour changes in relation to speakers, inaccurate, missing and repeated captions, captions which overran the segment and appeared at the beginning of the next story.

ACMA found that the captioning service was not meaningful for deaf and hearing impaired viewers.

10 advised ACMA, “… we have recently determined that a faulty caption inserter was intermittently affecting the closed captions. It is possible that the caption inserter also affected the two news bulletins in question in April 2020. The caption inserter has been replaced.”

In March 2021, Network 10 also implemented a new IP based broadcast playout system and replaced its legacy caption inserter. It did not expect to encounter the same issues.

10 will distribute ACMA’s findings to relevant staff for training purposes and discuss the published findings with its caption service provider.

Elsewhere, regional broadcaster WIN TV was found in breach over captioning matters twice this month.

4 Responses

  1. A year ago David had a great feature article on captioning tvtonight.com.au/2020/04/a-bobcat-said-in-parliament-today-the-world-of-tv-captions.html
    Nothing has changed, for the better.

  2. Don’t understand why someone would claim “it (is) almost impossible for anyone to find phone numbers or email addresses for them.” – A simple Google search brings up all state phone numbers and email contact page. News captioning on all network news programs is a disgrace. Almost always “inaccurate, missing and repeated captions, captions which overran the segment and appeared at the beginning of the next story” are normal. When it’s being read from an autocue one can’t follow how hard it must be to ingest that feed into a captioning system to give some sense of timely and accurate captioning, on the item currently on screen, not one or two stories late.

  3. 10 are terrible with live captions, always have been. What i’d love to see is captions on ALL of their stations too and not just them but across all the networks. So many shows on Bold and Peach are uncaptioned especially during the evening after 7:30pm when you watch and they’re US shows too. So they come with them automatically i believe. Its like they don’t care. At least the system works though but yeah more need to be done. It’s 2021. How hard is it?

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