Three and a half weeks after broadcasters were thrown off-air, normality is returning to Channel 5.
Channel 5 and its family of channels suffered days of technical issues as systems moved over to a back-up following the now infamous Red Bee Media incident.
The main Channel 5 service, in both SD and HD, plus its +1 channel have now come out of disaster recovery playout mode. During Wednesday 20th October, the on-screen black and white symbol indicating disaster recovery mode disappeared from viewer’s screens. The symbol still exists on some offshoot channels.
Last week, Channel 5 was able to restore subtitles and audio description to almost all of its peak-time schedule. Since then, further progress has been made to cover its remaining schedule.
My5 programmes are now also uploaded with accessibility features. Staff have manually re-uploaded programmes on to the streaming service that initially went live without access services.
Work is ongoing at Channel 4, which was also affected. Unlike Channel 5, parts of Channel 4’s back-up system also failed. Channel 4 is still unable to broadcast every service: music channels Magic and Kerrang remain off-air. They have been replaced by The Box. Channel 4 has apologised for the issues. It has said normality should return by mid-November.