Investigation Report No. 3338
Summary /File no. / ACMA2015/227 /
Licensee / Channel Seven Brisbane Pty Limited /
Station / 7TWO /
Type of service / Commercial television /
Name of programs / Lewis /
Date of broadcasts / 26 February 2015 /
Relevant Legislation / Subsection 130ZS(1) of Part 9D (captioning) of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (the BSA)
Paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA /
Date finalised / 10 July 2015 /
Decision / No breach of subsection 130ZS(1) of Part 9D of the BSA
No breach of paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA /
Background
On 2 March 2015, the ACMA received a complaint alleging that the licensee of the BTQ multi-channel service 7TWO (the service) failed to provide a captioning service for the Lewis program broadcast at 20:30 on Thursday, 26 February 2015 (the program).
The complaint has been investigated in relation to the licensee’s compliance with paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA. This provision requires the licensee to comply with the captioning obligations under Part 9D of the BSA.
The program
The program Lewis was a British television detective program broadcast from 20:30 to 22:38 on the service. The duration of the program is 2:08. The licensee confirmed that the program had previously been broadcast with captions on its primary service.
Submissions
The complainant’s submissions are at Attachment A and the licensee’s submissions are at Attachment B.
Assessment
This investigation is based on submissions from the complainant and the licensee and a copy of the broadcast provided to the ACMA by the licensee.
To determine whether the licensee has breached paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA, the ACMA has investigated the licensee’s compliance with the captioning obligations imposed under Part D of the BSA.
Issue: Did the licensee provide a captioning service for the program?
Relevant legislative provisions
Clause 7 of Part 3 of Schedule 2 to the BSA
(1) Each commercial television broadcasting licence is subject to the following conditions:
[...]
(o) If a provision of Part 9D (which deals with captioning of television programs for the deaf and hearing impaired) applies to the licensee – the licensee will comply with that provision.
Subsection 130ZS(1) of Part 9D of the BSA
Captioning obligations – special rules for multi-channelled services
(1) If:
(a) a commercial television broadcasting licence is in force; and
(b) the licence was not allocated under section38C; and
(c) the licensee transmits a television program on:
(i) a SDTV multi-channelled commercial television broadcasting service; or
(ii) a HDTV multi-channelled commercial television broadcasting service;
in the licence area; and
(d) the program has been previously transmitted on another commercial television broadcasting service provided by the licensee in the licence area; and
(e) the licensee provided a captioning service for the program when the program was so previously transmitted on the other service;
the licensee must provide a captioning service for the television program transmitted as mentioned in paragraph(c).
Finding
The licensee complied with the requirements of subsection 130ZS(1) of Part 9D of the BSA by providing a captioning service for the Lewis program broadcast on 26 February 2015. Therefore, the licensee complied with the licence condition in paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA.
Reasons
As the program was originally transmitted with captions on the licensee’s primary channel, the licensee is required to provide a captioning service for any subsequent broadcast of the program on any of its multi-channels, including the service.
The licensee maintains that it provided a captioning service for the program when it was broadcast on the service on 26 February 2015. The ACMA reviewed a recording of the broadcast provided by the licensee, which contains captions throughout.
The licensee submitted that, based on its internal investigations, there is no evidence to suggest that any technical or other transmission issue prevented the captions from being displayed.
The complainant lives outside of the Brisbane TV1 commercial television broadcasting licence area, in northern New South Wales and would appear to have received the service fortuitously. The licensee submitted that the complainant may have received the service via its Springbrook translator. The licensee submitted that it does not have a recording of the feed broadcast from the Springbrook translator, but that it reviewed the Mt Tambourine feed, which it submitted would be an exact reflection of the Springbrook signal, as the Springbrook translator receives the Mt Tambourine feed unaltered, and captions were present throughout.
The licensee also submitted that, based on its internal investigations, there was no outage at the Springbrook translator at the time of the broadcast. The licensee further submitted that a premises in Springbrook was receiving captions at the time of the broadcast, suggesting that the Springbrook translator broadcast captions at that time.
With the complainant’s agreement, the licensee contacted the complainant directly to try to identify why the complainant did not receive captions for the program. The licensee submitted that its discussions with the complainant established that the complainant had also been experiencing similar captioning issues in a number of programs on other television networks. The licensee maintains that this suggests that the captioning issue was most likely to have been caused by an issue relating to the complainant’s reception equipment. The ACMA acknowledges that some captioning issues may be related to the equipment used by viewers to receive and view television programs.
The ACMA considers, based the above evidence, that the licensee provided a captioning service for the program.
Accordingly, the licensee complied with subsection 130ZS(1) of Part 9D of the BSA. Consequently, the licensee complied with the licence condition in paragraph 7(1)(o) of Schedule 2 to the BSA, which requires the licensee to comply with the relevant provisions in Part 9D of the BSA.
Attachment A
The complainant submitted the following on 2 March 2015:
I wish to report that Channel 7 and its sister channel Seven Two seem to have abandoned closed captioning on many of its shows in the last week.
[…]
· “Lewis”, a British police drama shown on Seven Two at 8:30 pm on Thursday has not had captions the last couple of episodes.
The complainant clarified on 3 March 2015:
[…]
We live right on the NSW/QLD border and receive channels from both states. The shows are as follows:
[…]
· ‘Lewis’ - 9:30PM 7 TWO Gold Coast Thursday 27 [sic] Feb (8:30 PM QLD Scheduled time)
[…]
Attachment B
The licensee submitted on 8 May 2015 that the broadcast contained captions.
The licensee further submitted the following on 19 May 2015:
I refer to the above complaint and as requested set out details below of the investigations undertaken by Seven in relation to this complaint:
· Seven reviewed the BTQ off-air broadcast and confirmed that captions were present throughout;
· Seven reviewed the phone logs for the relevant evening and confirmed that no calls were received regarding caption outages;
· Seven noted that the postcode 2487 is 20km outside the service area for BTQ-7 Brisbane. Whilst the viewer might be getting fortuitous reception of BTQ-7, it is also possible the viewer was watching through the Springbrook (lower Gold Coast) translator. Whilst we do not have a recording of the Springbrook Translator service, we do have a recording of the Mt Tambourine (northern Gold Coast). The Springbrook translator is fed an ASI signal from Mt Tambourine which is a split of the ASI signal from 7BCM Melbourne. As there is no decoding, re-encoding etc as would have happened in the old analogue days, so a recording of Mt Tambourine should be an exact reflection of the signal also emitted at Springbrook. We reviewed the Mt Tambourine feed and confirmed captions were present throughout.
· We contacted TxA (the owners of the Springbrook translator) and they confirmed there were no outage of the Springbrook translator on the relevant date/time.
· After we became aware of the complaint we also got an installer out to a Springbrook premises to confirm captions was being received from this site, and the installer confirmed that captions were displaying correctly.
Based on the above there is no evidence to suggest any technical or other transmission issue occurred that prevented captions from being displayed.
The licensee further submitted the following on 3 June 2015 that:
· I can confirm that Seven has not deployed a new compression headend nor any made [sic] changes to the existing at or around the relevant time.
· We do not believe fortuitous reception outside the service would be likely to impact the reception of captions – to the extent that the video and audio associated with any program would be more prone to disruption than any subtitles associate with the relevant service.
The licensee further submitted the following on 23 June 2015 that:
We did speak to the complainant but we were not able to reach a definitive conclusion in relation to the cause of his issues.
We did establish that the complainant was watching all programs through a Topfield PVR. We also established that the problems he was experiencing were not just related to the program complained about (Lewis) but to a number of other programs on other networks. To us this suggests that the issue was most likely caused by an issue with the complainant’s reception equipment.
[…]
ACMA Investigation Report—Lewis broadcast by 7TWO on 26 February 2015 2