When a program nets some
97.5 million viewers, the last thing you want as a broadcaster is trouble with your transmission. Nevertheless, reports are already starting to flow in from towns in which their local FOX affiliate or cable provider somehow bungled what's likely to go down as the biggest night in US sports for 2008. One report out of Kinston, North Carolina, noted that multiple disruptions during kickoff and most of the third quarter had customers at a local restaurant "cursing at the television." As for a particular family near Springfield, Missouri, it's actually considering "canceling the cable service" after SuddenLink's mishandling of the game forced them to watch it via "rabbit ears." Any of you experience unforeseen outages during Sunday's matchup? If so, are you planning a revolt at your carrier's doorstep, or have cooler heads prevailed?
[Image courtesy of
WiredVision]
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posted February 5th 2008 8:56PM
The Fox affiliate in Omaha periodically throughout the game would overlay a time and temperature graphic on the bottom left of the screen. No big deal you think? Well, everytime they did it, they would switch the feed to SD (the audio would go to plain stereo also). This lasted for about 10-15 seconds and was very annoying because one minute you were watching beatiful HD and then all of the sudden BAM, blurry crap. Thanks KPTM, I really needed to know the time (when you got it right, usually off by 3 or 4 minutes) and that the temperature hadn't changed.
Thank you!
Like I had any plans involving going outside or leaving at a particular time before the game ended.
I live in eastern Carolina and boy am I glad I went to my brothers house to watch the super bowl. He gets his signal OTA from Raleigh. When I got to work the next day, everyone was complaining that they missed most of the first half and part of the second. This link says it all: http://www.reflector.com/local/content/news/stories/2008/02/05/Foxfollow.html
We have Comcast here in Chicago and we didn't have any problems.
No outages here, but I am sick of the local affiliates dropping to the SD feed whenever they do station IDs. Not only does the picture turn to crap, but 5.1 turns into 2.0.
The only problem I experienced during the game was that lame HD DVD ad
bresnan in billings, mt and we had several freeze ups even a few minutes were it switched to sd
OTA Fox mysteriously disappeared before the game, DirectTV doesn't do local HD here...alas, DirecTV did carry Fox HD for the SuperBowl so we were happy. (Channel 701)
However, after a year of OTA Fox HD it's now gone...
Sincerely...really pissed.
i live in north carolina and didn't hear about broadcast disruption but i heard in the holly springs area they had a large power outage an hour before the game.
Everything looked alright in Baltimore City with Comcast HD.
I live NE of Cincy, OH and I lost service. I have DirecTV.
Lost all of the 3rd Q because I was recording it and wasnt around to change the channel. But apparently there werent any good commercials so I didnt miss much.
in cincinnati oh, directv had a problem with the fox station... it seemed like it would play, freeze, play, freeze, etc. we also always have problems with the audio from the receiver on whatever channel is in hd, so we just switched to the over the signal through the tv. all was well.
Watched the game in HD through Charter here in Madison WI with some audio problems. Lost audio two or three times for 1-2 minutes. Mostly during commercials. Not surprised though, as Charter seems to have some issues around here with their HD channels. Lots of pixelating and freeze/go/freeze/go kind of stuff lately.
No loss of signal here in Cinci with DirecTV, but I did have this problem too. They told me to switch to channel 701 a little before half-time and all was well after that.
Time Warner in Northern NJ, No outages or futzing around that I can recall.
I have TWC in LA (arcadia) and I didn't have any problems with my TV signal but my internet went out. My modem couldn't get a IP address for the second half of the game and well into the night.
It wasn't until ~9:30 that I was able to get a IP address and continue rocking rockband online.
I live in KC and there was this kid that was missing and they constantly took it back to SD to show the kids face and also showcased the name of the father who was a suspect and how long it would last and they kept showing it every (it felt) 10 minutes and OMG was it annoying. I'm watching the Super Bowl and after the 30th time it was like Ok...that's enough.....SD sucks!
another DirecTV customer, and yeah, saw lots of glitching. For awhile, it was mostly with the ads and promo's for the Terminator series. Then there was a bunch of audio dropouts during the halftime show... after a 5-sec. complete video dropout, I switched to the channel 701 broadcast... I'm just lucky I'm a reader of DBSTalk or I'd never have known about that channel. 701 used a slightly more grainy MPEG2 stream vs. the MPEG4 I was watching via. the local DFW Fox affiliate... but at least it was stable!
So who's to blame? If I were an advertiser who paid millions, I'd be pissed!
DirecTV in Dallas
Prior to the game starting, I was watching pre-game stuff on the HD channel. I had a lot of freezing video, blocked video, etc. It was very frustrating. I ended up leaving to watch the game elsewhere and not sure how the actual game ended up being.
Of note, it was a perfectly clear day and other HD channels had no issues.
in phoenix, the affiliate kept running a scroller about weather happening in northeastern arizona during the game. much like above, it would switch to standard def. phoenix can't catch a break. our fox affiliate fucks us. cox fucks us. we can't win.
I feel you man! I kept yelling at the TV because I couldnt figure out what was happening! I hate freakin Cox and if Qwest didnt suck such fat balls...I'd go for them...One other thing I noticed was Howie's effing suit made my head hurt. People shouldnt be allowed to wear pinstripes in HD.
Comcast HD in Philly, and everything looked great! No glitches, loss of service, switching to SD, or loss of audio channels. My only gripe about the game was that the eagles weren't in it! Otherwise, the game was awesome!
I'm in the Houston area and have UVERSE. Watched it in HD, picture was good 99% of the time. Only problem was the audio was off by a half a second or so. It was fairly noticeable but only noticeable when the had the commentator on the screen. The SD audio when I switched to it to see if it had the same problem did not.
No interruptions in Denver area.
Is anyone actually surprised by this?
This is FOX people. The absolute scum of the universe. Why would I be surprised about something like this when primetime TV shows constantly go in and out on Fox (until they're inevitably canceled, of course) and when the Florida Gators playing in the BCS National Championship is shown in SD in GAINESVILLE friggin FLORIDA on Fox?
There were similar problems in Denver, via Fox-31's DirecTV feed but not OTA. So what did Fox do? They opened another channel and supplied us with Fox-5's feed from New York. It took them all of a minute to do it, and all was well.
We were thankful for DirecTV's quick fix!