Red Bee Media have said that they are “looking at all options” to restore subtitling services to channels such as Channel 4 and Channel 5, as an outage that has been said to have been triggered by fire suppression systems enters its second week.
The incident took place at the company’s Broadcast Centre in London on Saturday 25 September, and led to a string of technical difficulties across mainstream TV channels, with last Tuesday’s edition of The Great British Bake-Off airing without subtitles.
In a statement shared to Twitter on Friday, Red Bee said: “We know how vital these services are to large communities of viewers and we are sorry for the disruption. There are ongoing issues affecting the media we rely upon for the pre-recorded subtitles, audio description and signing services.
As a result of the incident at the Broadcast Centre in London on 25 September, we are continuing to experience some disruption to the accessibility services we deliver on behalf of our broadcast customers. (1/5)
— Red Bee Media (@RedBeeMedia) October 8, 2021
“Our tech teams are working around the clock to fix these issues and we are looking at all available options to restore the services as quickly as possible.”
They went on to add that they have “managed to increase the number of programmes” where their accessibility services are provided, with their subtitlers, audio describers and signers continuing to “work incredibly hard with the current output”.
“We recognise the vital importance of delivering accessible programmes, and our teams are fully committed to getting all services completely back up and running as soon as possible,” they said.
Red Bee also stated that they expect to make additional improvements “soon”, but did not give a timetable for when services would be back online.
By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.
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David Buxton
October 8, 2021
I cannot understand why Red Bee don’t have a back up system to store completed subtitling work! It seems they don’t have one in spite that they runs nearly £100m a year company. My charity has a server that always backs up every night by our external IT contractor, we only runs £1m a year.
We were so frustrated not watching subtitled programme in the past few weeks so I do hope it will be restored next week, no more another month!
OphiuchiHotline
October 8, 2021
They had subtitles on this afternoon, they where a mix of hot garbage AI generation worse than Youtube that was spewing out gibberish, subtitles appearing 20 minutes behind and subtitles for a completely different program not even on the schedule.