When I host a Super Bowl party the things I usually worry about is having enough food, making sure my TV and audio are in working condition and there is enough seating. What else could go wrong?
Picture this. You have a group of people coming over to watch the most watched game of the year – the Super Bowl game on your home theater, projection screen system. Everything is going well, the pre-game is on in the background as people are arriving and all of the sudden the channel goes black. No picture, no sound nothing. You frantically check all the other channels which are all fine. After almost an hour a message finally appears on the screen telling you they are experiencing technical difficulties…
That’s pretty much as close to a Super Bowl party disaster as you can get and it really happened to thousands of viewers in Northwest Arkansas and Southeastern Oklahoma Dish and DirecTV subscribers due to a software glitch at Arkansas FOX affiliate KFTA.
My Dad called to ask me if I was having problems in Kansas City (I wasn’t.) DirecTV put up a message for subscribers to turn to an alternative channel where they were broadcasting the channel from an alternate “local channel” for the game, but Dish Network subscribers like my Dad were out of luck.
The outage lasted until just before the end of the third quarter. For those that waited that long, they did get to see the most exciting quarter of the game (the fourth of course), but there will be a LOT of unhappy people around those parts. And Arkansas people weren’t alone, looks like Nevada had some problems as well.
Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.
More (potential) horror stories…
Alex of TiVo Blog gets his Fox on a “switched” channel, meaning he can’t watch it via TiVo. Fortunately, he had a pair of rabbit ears.
Melissa and I relocated from her sister’s family’s home at the end of the third quarter. When we got to our place the digital/HD Fox (CW and Showtime too) channel was all black (still was as of last night) on the bedroom TiVo. While I was busy cursing Comcast, Melissa smartly tried the SD simulcast which was working.
The game was great, and the commercials weren’t memorable. Though, I want to find out more about Wanted.
‘Wanted’ does look cool:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/wanted/wanted_medium.html
And it IS based on Mark Millar’s comic book, so you know the source material is good. More here:
http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?id=17347
My dad is still ticked at Dish Network. Even though it was the local stations fault, Dish Network did absolutely nothing to help out their customers. DirecTV had an alternate SuperBowl feed reading for this exact situation and redirected their customers to the alternate channel within minutes of the outage. Dish could take a pointer from DirecTV on how to deal with such a situation.
My dad lives right by a lake and is surrounded by hills so no antenna reception as a backup….
My friend bought an OTA antenna just to guard against this possibility.
As I mentioned elsewhere, we’re moving next month and I’ve been segregating items into stuff I’ll keep, stuff I’ll ebay, and stuff I’ll trash. The OTA antenna was on the list of disposables – guess I’ll hang onto it for emergencies like this.
Remember the court ruling that permanently barred Dish from offering distant network service? It’s also why Dish couldn’t do anything quickly here. Thanks to the ruling, in order to offer ANY out-of-market stations (other than the superstations like WPIX and KTLA, which are covered separately), Dish has to jump through a series of extra hoops that DirecTV doesn’t. Meanwhile, DirecTV followed the law, so all it had to do was to get permission from the local affiliate.