Super Bowl Party Disaster

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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…

kfta.jpg 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 a local Arkansas TV Station 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.

 

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