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 | You and Yours - Transcript ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 15.06.04 – CAMPAIGNERS CALL FOR TOUGHER SUBTITLING TARGETS PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ´óÏó´«Ã½ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY BARCLAY Now Ofcom, the new broadcasting regulator, which came into being in December has many responsibilities, one of which is to regulate subtitling. One million hearing impaired people rely on it. Terrestrial television companies already subtitle large proportions of their programmes but cable and satellite companies lag behind. And Ofcom has ordered them to subtitle 60% of programme hours by the year 2008 and 80% by 2013. The Royal National Institute for the Deaf welcomes this but is concerned that there are no interim yearly targets as well. Ofcom's content board is meeting today to discuss the issue, Tim Suter is from Ofcom and John Lowe is the RNID's chief executive. LOWE The previous regulator, ITC, set annual interim targets for those channels it was responsible for regulating and these increased every year and therefore you had a growing percentage of television that was accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. Now we have a situation where Ofcom are turning the clock back and setting 10% as the target for five years, then suddenly leaping up to 60%. BARLCAY Tim Suter from Ofcom, why are you putting the clock back? SUTER Well I'm not quite sure that it's fair to say we're putting the clock back. The 60% target was indeed set by Parliament. Parliament decided that it should have a high interim of 60% after five years with the express intention that that would mean that channels would get a move on and get going quickly. And we went out to consultation on the basis that given that rule was there was there any need to put in additional targets in the interim? And we've had a very robust and lovely discussion about that and John has very clearly made his views known, that without those interim targets he doesn't believe that necessarily people will get a sufficient move on. We've listened carefully to those views, we'll be considering those at the content board meeting today and making our decisions in the light of the consultation responses we've had and also the views of our own committee for old and disabled people. BARCLAY So John, taking those points, more companies are now included - that's a good thing. LOWE Sure that's a good thing, of course. But there are a million people out there who cannot watch television without subtitles. There are five million people who use them regularly. This is not some minority interest, this is mainstream access to a key part of our culture and society. UK Gold, for example, under the Ofcom proposals, would only be required to subtitle 3% of their content - this is just crazy, why do we have to go to a situation where we pull back on the targets instead of challenging the television companies to increase and to develop access to their services? I'm just bewildered by Ofcom's position. SUTER I think it's very important to make it clear that the number of channels that we're including here is significantly larger than the number of channels that were included before. That where channels have voluntarily supplied services to increase access I see no reason to suppose that that voluntary offering would not continue. What we're doing is including more channels in the requirement to make a start in offering those services. BARCLAY But John subtitling programmes is that extra cost and some of those satellite companies don't have very large audiences. LOWE The real issue here is that the cost of subtitling is very, very low, we're speaking about £150 per hour for live broadcasting, £400 per hour for recorded. These are tiny, tiny costs compared to the cost of producing the programmes and some channels are virtually a 100% repeats. So why do we set very, very low targets - 10% - on channels that are virtually a 100% repeated programmes with the subtitles already existing? SUTER Targets alone haven't delivered the kind of increase in services to viewers that we would like to see and the reason that we put forward as a proposition the notion that you would not set interim targets was precisely that channels seeing that they were going to be reaching 60% after five years and knowing that that was an obligation that was statutory and placed upon them, would naturally, we believed, seek to increase their targets year on year. It's not sensible, from a business point of view, to leave it all until the last year and then suddenly hope that you'll be able to achieve a six fold increase in your subtitling. BARCLAY But what happens if that - if that does turn out to be the case and then companies turn round and say - well I'm sorry we can't do it? SUTER Well they run the risk of being in complete breach of their licence obligations, what's more in breach of the licence obligations they've had for five years and we've been warning them that this is coming. BARCLAY And one final piece of advice then John, before this actually does go to the board. LOWE I think it's vital that Ofcom in this very first test of their willingness to protect the interests of disabled and vulnerable people choose to support them rather than to protect and develop the interests of the commercial television companies. BARCLAY John Lowe from the RNID and Tim Suter from Ofcom. And Ofcom will be publishing its final subtitling code by the end of the July. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for external websites |
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