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Yes, OutTV, in current and previous incarnations, has suffered at the hands of the homophobic assholes who run the Canadian distribution oligopoly, especially at Shaw, but let’s get real here: This is a federally-licensed business that has had years to get its act together on every level – and hasn’t. It’s a nonviable business.
What nobody seems to be pointing out in this process is just how atrocious OutTV’s programming is. The whole schedule seems frozen in time. It seems like the hazy memory of the movies and television shows that an eldergay who came out in the 1980s would have watched. (Takes one to know one.) Plus there are seemingly unending repeats not just each day and week but throughout the year.
Fundamentally, in 2013 nobody needs this many chances to re-rewatch Brideshead Revisited.
Here are just some of the out-of-date, overexposed series and films OutTV keeps playing and replaying and re-replaying. Actually, instead of coming up with my own précis, why don’t I just give you the sorted but undeduped list of shows from OutTV’s weekly programming guide? (Remember: Multiply all these by four for a monthly list.)
A-List New York
A-List New York
A-List New York
Alan Carr: Chatty Man
Alan Carr: Chatty Man
Beautiful People
Beautiful People
Beautiful People
Beverly Hills Fabulous
Beverly Hills Fabulous
Beverly Hills Fabulous
Breaker High
Breaker High
Breaker High
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited
Bump!
Bump!
Bump!
Candy Bar Girls
Candy Bar Girls
Candy Bar Girls
Chasing Spring
Chasing Spring
Chasing Spring
Cherry Bomb
Cherry Bomb
Cherry Bomb
Designer Travel
Designer Travel
Designer Travel
Don’t Quit Your Gay Job
Don’t Quit Your Gay Job
Don’t Quit Your Gay Job
DTLA
DTLA
DTLA
DTLA After Dark
DTLA After Dark
DTLA After Dark
DTLA After Dark
Favorite Places
Favorite Places
Favorite Places
Gay Army
Gay Army
Gay Army
Gayest Show Ever
Gayest Show Ever
Gayest Show Ever
Homorazzi
Homorazzi
Homorazzi
Homorazzi
Hot Pink Shorts
Hot Pink Shorts
Hot Pink Shorts – The Making of
Hot Pink Shorts – The Making of
Hot Pink Shorts – The Making of
How Far Will You Go?
How Far Will You Go?
How Far Will You Go?
Hunks
Hunks
Hunks
Improv Comedy: Tops & Bottoms
Improv Comedy: Tops & Bottoms
Improv Comedy: Tops & Bottoms
In the Kitchen
In the Kitchen
In the Kitchen
Karma Trekkers
Karma Trekkers
Karma Trekkers
KoKo Pop
KoKo Pop
KoKo Pop
Ladyboys
Ladyboys
Ladyboys
Let’s Talk Sex
Let’s Talk Sex
Let’s Talk Sex
London Live – UK Top 100 Album Chart
London Live – UK Top 100 Album Chart
London Live – UK Top 100 Album Chart
Men’s Fashion Insider
Men’s Fashion Insider
Men’s Fashion Insider
New Addams Family
New Addams Family
New Addams Family
1 Girl 5 Gays
Out for Laughs
Out for Laughs
Out for Laughs
Outlook TV
Outlook TV
Outlook TV
Queer as Folk
Queer as Folk
Queer as Folk
Queer as Folk UK
Queer as Folk UK
Queer as Folk UK
Room Service
Room Service
Room Service
RuPaul’s All-Stars Drag Race
RuPaul’s All-Stars Drag Race
RuPaul’s All-Stars Drag Race
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 2
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 2
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 2
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5
RuPaul’s Drag U
RuPaul’s Drag U
RuPaul’s Drag U
Savoir Faire
Savoir Faire
Savoir Faire
Steven and Chris
Steven and Chris
Steven and Chris
Untucked: RuPaul’s All-Star Drag Race
Untucked: RuPaul’s All-Star Drag Race
Untucked: RuPaul’s All-Star Drag Race
Untucked: RuPaul’s All-Star Drag Race
Untucked: RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5
Untucked: RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5
Wen Hair Care
Wen Hair Care
Wine Portfolio
Wine Portfolio
Wine Portfolio
Now let’s check the February movie list (deduped):
Better Than Chocolate
Birdcage
Eye Candy: The Crazy World of David LaChapelle
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Heels
Holiday Heart
J’en suis
Kick Off
Leading Ladies
Leslie Jordan: My Trip Down the Pink Carpet
Mulligans
Positive Youth
Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
Sex Positive
Southern Comfort
Thelma & Louise
It’s one stinker after another. Lesbian and gay film festivals have no trouble screening dozens of new feature films each year, but OutTV resides in a permanent 1990s twilight in which management deludes itself that viewers really need a few more chances to watch Thelma & Louise.
In practice, the only reason to subscribe to OutTV is to watch the various RuPaul television extravaganzas. That’s the only reason we subscribe, in fact. Were these shows on any other network, we’d watch them there – and we did that for RuPaul’s Drag Race when it aired on Bravo.
OutTV’s programming is so dreadful there would be no reason whatsoever to subscribe to it without its marquee drag performer RuPaul, who isn’t even Canadian and isn’t even in any distant way on OutTV’s payroll.
No civilian knows better than I do the extent to which marketers will lie about the income of the gay and lesbian community. This lie is pretty simple: We’re rich! Except we aren’t, as the consensus of the research into lesbian and gay incomes and earnings shows. (I read all the research.)
Still, it says something about OutTV’s basic competence that it has never been able to spin a tale of gay wealth to potential advertisers. Not even Procter & Gamble advertises on OutTV. There seems to be a Honda commercial on the channel from time to time, but, whaddya know, it’s actually from a single Honda dealer in Richmond, B.C., down the road from OutTV’s glamorous offices.
Nobody goes into the for-profit broadcasting business for any reason other than to turn a profit. Not only can OutTV not manage to do that, it can’t even manage to sell commercial airtime at all.
The worst picture I’ve ever seen has consistently emanated from OutTV. It’s overcompressed in standard definition and, in HD, it’s apparently transmitted in Soviet-like 720p.
OutTV is in material breach of its original licence requirements to caption programming and to be technically capable of passing through audio description. The channel, irrespective of name or ownership, has always been in breach of these requirements. I visited PrideVision in its Toronto offices a good ten years ago (I suppose I could look up the date) to try to talk accessibility with them, which resulted in nothing.
Fundamentally there is no captioning on OutTV. After years of managing to air only the uncaptioned version (the issue revolves around uncensored vs. bleeped audio, but that’s just an excuse), RuPaul’s Drag Race and Untucked are finally, as of this season, airing with captioning. Except captioning invariably dies after the first commercial break. (In fact, the RuPaul episodes airing in the week this comment period closed [2013.02.25] did so with no captioning whatsoever. That’s how incompetent these people are.)
What OutTV calls “captioning” of its own shows involves:
Hiring what appears to be Gigecast to pop on, at a three‑ to five-second delay, half-assed all-bottom-centred captions on shows like the intrinsically reprehensible A-List New York.
Hiring what appears to be Gigecast to mistranslate and incorrectly encode scrollup captions for Men’s Fashion Insider.
And... nothing else.
OutTV is currently adding closed captioning to all of its newly-acquired and commissioned programming, and to all programs that have a remaining [licence] period of two years or more.
A couple of episodes of a couple of shows have turned up with captioning. There is no discernible evidence that OutTV is “currently adding captioning.” All programming (let’s say 90% at first, but 100% now) was supposed to be captioned all along.
The company that handles OutTV’s closed captioning guarantees... 100% accuracy[.]
Then they’re in breach of contract. These youngsters and amateurs don’t know what captioning is and, assuming Gigecast is the vendor, refuse to learn. (I should know – I offered to teach them how to caption for a fee.) Anyway, you aren’t gonna get quality captioning from a postproduction house in Edmonton. It’s just not happening.
You cannot do quality assurance on captioning by “ask[ing] an editor on staff to randomly pick” a captioning “file.” You have to watch it all the time – and know what you’re talking about in the first place.
OutTV does not correct captioning errors ever, let alone for “a subsequent broadcast day.” OutTV has no capacity to correct “errors” in the first place. OutTV admits it does not monitor captioning, hence it cannot possibly correct errors staff do not see. The entire section (reply letter, 2012.11.06) entitled “Closed[‑]captioning monitoring” is nothing more than wishful thinking and does not remotely resemble the actual practice of OutTV. That section, in any event, contradicts what went before it.
OutTV must be banned from using any kind of “software” for captioning. Tellingly, no details are given in the public documents, but what they mean is completely automated voice-recognition captioning, which contravenes what passes for CRTC rules about captioning and would trigger a human-rights complaint that would bankrupt the network.
What OutTV must do is what it is supposed to have been doing all along: Caption prerecorded fictional narrative programming in pop-on captioning, with pop-on or scrollup captioning (not produced in real time) for nonfiction programming. And it can’t use the lowest bidder or grasping postproduction houses like Gigecast, either. In fact, while Vancouver makes no sense as the headquarters of any TV network, it has the advantage of a sometimes reasonably competent captioning house right there in the city, namely Line 21 Media Services Ltd.
Also, given how little first-run programming ever airs in any guise on OutTV, it is preposterous to accept the suggestion that OutTV cannot afford captioning. This is a network that airs endless repeats. Caption it once and it stays captioned, assuming technical competence in the control room, which admittedly OutTV lacks.
Further, since the only actually interesting programming on the network consists of those scant few episodes of Don’t Quit Your Gay Job and American shows from the Logo network, OutTV’s captioning costs can be easily reduced by the simple fact that all those American shows are already available with captions. OutTV is too incompetent to get its hands on those captioned versions. That will have to change.
By the way, do you want me to reach back into the transcripts for the original competitive licence hearings for the gay channel and replicate what PrideVision’s would-be owners at the time said about captioning? Spoiler alert: They said they’d do more than CHUM would. Look where we are now.
It’s ever so easy for the educated middle-class mandarins at the CRTC to look kindly upon a gay TV channel. If nothing else, CRTC staff want to seem liberal and open. A gay TV channel is a good idea and Canada should have a licensed gay TV channel.
But good intentions and the CRTC’s desire to seem all liberal and accepting are no substitute for a channel people actually want to watch. Nor are they a substitute for a viable business. OutTV is none of the above.
It’s time to deem the PrideVision/OutTV experiment a failure. It’s been a manifest business failure several times over by its current management’s own admission. Let’s all just accept the facts.
Cancel OutTV’s licence open a new application process for a lesbian and gay TV channel. OutTV’s current owners can apply alongside actually competent suitors. Of course that’s grievously unfair when oligopoly-owned channels are in flagrant daily violation of licence requirements and are laughing all the way to the bank. Of course it’s unfair! It’s also necessary.
Again: Yes, this would mean crime does pay for billionaire commercial broadcasters, but OutTV is a failed enterprise and we need to start from scratch. (Want to make this especially interesting? Throw mandatory carriage into the pot and see what happens.)
If OutTV’s licence is renewed:
Renew it for two years.
Force OutTV, within 30 days, to reach 100% captioning (pop-on for fictional narrative programming, pop-on or scrollup [not live] for nonfiction programming).
Force OutTV to fix the technical transmission errors that kill captioning a third of the way through an airing.
Force OutTV to install audible and visible alarms in master control that will alert staff when captions disappear.
Posted: 2013.02.27