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To watch any of our HD channels, you will need to have the appropriate equipment either a Freeview, Sky or Virgin HD box/card as well as an HD TV.
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Channel 4 commission and buy programmes but don't produce any in-house. Consequently, there are no celebrities working in our offices. For this reason, we aren't able to provide autographs or signed photos.
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No, instead, we provide funding for sign presented programming which are shown on the Community Channel’s new BSL zone. For information on what programming is available and where, please have a look at the Community Channel website for full details HERE.
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For information on programmes featuring signing, please click here to visit our access services web page.
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On-screen logos are very much a part of the multi-channel world and being competitive in this environment is tough. Channel 4 tries to maintain this competitiveness by making high quality programmes that people want to watch and by establishing loyalty, so that when a viewer is watching television, they watch Channel 4 channels rather than the hundreds of other choices.
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Our aim is for the listings to be as accurate as possible and we do not want to disappoint our viewers. We send out a list of the programmes we intend to subtitle to the magazines, newspapers, television electronic programme guides and text services. The information we supply to the listings organisations is up to date when it is issued and should be accurate. We also issue updates when there are schedule changes.
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Channel 4 is a commercial operation and like all organisations we have to balance the need to respond to comments and requests with the resources which that inevitably incurs. Our aim is to try to minimise overheads so we can maximise our programme spend. We have looked at our call volumes and times of peak demand and have arranged the opening hours with this in mind.
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There's a common complaint from the viewing public that commercials sound too loud when compared with programmes.Why is this? To gain impact, commercial advertisers tend to "compress" the sound levels which means they lift them all up to the higher end - and this is what creates the greater impact. However, when compared against programmes which have a wider dynamic range - a wider variation in sound levels - this can cause irritation, because the two types of sound treatment don't sit very well together. Channel 4 has recognised this as a problem for viewers, and we use perceived loudness meters which give us a measure of the way the brain perceives the actual loudness of the sound. This allows us to adjust the levels of commercials and other interstitial material in accordance with Ofcom guidelines, so that they no longer cause irritation when compared with the wide majority of programme types transmitted by Channel 4. We continue to strive for an even perceived loudness through all our programming junctions on all our services.
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Our aim is for the listings to be as accurate as possible and we do not want to disappoint our viewers. We send out a list of the programmes we intend to subtitle to the magazines, newspapers, television electronic programme guides and text services. The information we supply to the listings organisations is up-to-date when it is issued and should be accurate. We also issue updates when there are schedule changes to ensure the Electronic Programme Guide is as up-to-date as possible. Very occasionally, we are not able to subtitle the programmes we had hoped to. This may be due to a number of reasons such as technical problems or the unexpectedly late delivery of a programme. We do appreciate that this causes great disappointment.
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When a show is live or completed very close to transmission, it is not possible to prepare the subtitles in advance. To provide subtitles on live programmes (or on programmes completed very close to transmission), we employ a technique known as broadcast stenography or stenocaptioning.
Stenography is a type of machine-written shorthand based on phonetics, as used to record proceedings in courts and for parliamentary committees. Our stenographers employ the same technique, with the difference that the shorthand outline is translated by computer and transmitted instantly to air. Our stenographers are very experienced, but when writing previously unseen material at speeds of up to 240 words per minute, some mistakes are inevitable. They may occur because a word may come up that has not been fed into the stenographer’s dictionary, in which case the computer will supply a "phonetic" translation.
Sometimes the speed at which they work makes it inevitable that a finger will be in the wrong place, and a simple word will translate as something completely different. Mistakes may in fact represent only one finger error or “typo”. We also use speech recognition technology to provide live subtitling. A speech subtitler listens to the commentary and "re-speaks" it into software which recognises the speech and translates it into subtitles. Speech recognition produces a different range of errors to stenography as the software attempts to "make sense" of the sounds it hears, so instead of seeing phonetic translations, words may appear out of context.
The average person speaks over 240 words a minute and although this is fine for the average listener, it is much too fast for anyone reading subtitles, especially with a picture to watch at the same time. Subtitlers, therefore, have to reduce the number of words that are said so that the subtitles can be read in the time it takes the speaker to say them. They must also synchronise the subtitles with the soundtrack and make it clear who is saying what. In order to achieve all of this, it is sometimes necessary to edit the soundtrack and careful yet quick decisions have to be made about how best to do this.
With all this in mind, a small delay between the words spoken on screen and the subtitles appearing is inevitable. We aim to keep this delay as short as possible, but it is often more noticeable on an unscripted programme such as Big Brother where often several people are talking at once. Subtitles on live programmes are therefore not precisely synchronised with the soundtrack, as you may expect in pre-recorded programmes. Our live team constantly work towards eliminating errors and consistently achieve extremely accurate results across a wide range of programmes. However, live programming presents some of the biggest challenges to live subtitlers and some mistakes are unfortunately inevitable.
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