★★★★★ 0/5

WIN TV in breach over lack of captions

WIN TV has acknowledged failing to caption Nine News broadcasts in July.

2
Leave a comment

WIN TV has breached the Broadcasting Services Act for failing to provide captions to news broadcasts.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority found WIN TV in Gippsland failed to offer captions for deaf and hearing-impaired viewers of its Nine News (Melbourne) broadcast from 1 to 4 July 2021.

“Captioning is available to us on regular programming from Channel Nine, but captioning ceases with the evening news every day. It restarts after the news finishes. The preview to the news even has closed captions,” a complainant said.

WIN TV confirmed the error, blaming it on faulty equipment.

WIN told ACMA, “The issue was a faulty captioning inserter at the Affiliate broadcast centre (NPC) which sits between Channel 9 Melbourne studio and WIN Broadcast Centre (MediaHub). The faulty device only affected the down conversion by adding extraneous data in the signal which corrupted the down conversion process, therefore not allowing the pass-through of captions to the SD (CH8) broadcast of the Channel Nine Melbourne News. NPC have now replaced the faulty device which is now allowing captions to be processed to the down converted SD broadcast signal for Channel 9 News Melbourne.”

WIN said as NPC have rectified the problem, it did not anticipate that it will be a problem in the future.

ACMA did not advise of any remedial action.

2 Responses

  1. Am perplexed by this.
    Were HD captions present?
    Did the same feed of the Nine Melbourne News studio have no captions for Mildura viewers which travels via the same GTV/NPC/MHA SD path prior to the affilation switch last July 1? WIN controls both the WIN wholly owned and joint venture with Prime signals in Mildura, incuding prior to and after the WIN network wide affiliare switchover last July 1.

    Seems an expensive way to provide transmission if sourcing separate simultaneous SD and HD paths of the exact same network program content? Is more industry practice to just source the HD path, switch in commetcial content in HD at the affiliate end and then down convert an SD version prior to hitting the affiliate transmitter with both the HD and SD vetsion of the exact same simultaneous program?
    To have separate local break insertion at SD and HD level simultaneously would cost a fortune and be very inefficient.

  2. It always intrigues me that ACMA’s investigations and findings of these incidents are limited in scope to the exact circumstances presented in the original complaint, and never notes the wider impact of the fault. For example in this case the fault lied with the downconversion of the 9 Melbourne feed from HD to SD at NPC, meaning it impacted WIN’s SD broadcast of Nine News Melbourne across all of Victoria and Tasmania, not just Gippsland. Depending on where exactly in the equipment chain the faulty device was, it might have also affected Nine Melbourne SD, yet this is never investigated by ACMA.

    The question of how the fault went unfixed for three days is never asked. Was it unnoticed? Was there no other way for NPC or MediaHub to downconvert the captions to bypass the fault?

    I’m sure the Engineering teams at NPC and MediaHub would have considered these things. Why doesn’t ACMA look in to these things?

Leave a Reply