On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 3:59 AM, PGage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I wonder if the technical people here can explain this a little > better. Why couldn't they have put an audio feed on the air? It seems > like, if they could put the Steve Harvey show on they could have found > a way to grab the radio feed from ESPN or something and put it on > until they fixed the problem.
I'll preface this by saying my experience is with small-market television and not so much with national cable networks, so this is obviously a guess. They said the router failed. The router is basically an audio/video switchboard--think of the old-time telephone operators stringing a cable from one phone line to another to place calls. The router is an electronic version of that, allowing a station to direct any piece of audio/video to anyplace that has an output from the router. The master control switcher (the piece of equipment, not the person operating it) likely has only a limited number of direct inputs on the board, which are reserved for things like tape decks, servers and commercial playback systems. (This being TBS, there are likely direct feeds from CNN and other semi-external sources available as well.) Because they need the flexibility to patch anything on the air, there are several outputs for the router, so the MCO can patch through anything necessary for on-air. But, if the router fails, the MCO is limited to the buttons that are directly patched into the switcher itself--thus, the standby tape of "Steve Harvey", 'cause there was nothing else to go to. The other thing is that, ignoring any rights issues with ESPN, the engineers there likely knew it wouldn't take very long to get the router back up and running, and it would take some of them away from working on the router problem to devise some method of patching through the audio. Plus, if they went to those extremes, trying to patch through the audio from ESPN, it would basically be them trying to bypass the entire infrastructure of master control--essentially connecting the ESPN audio directly into the outgoing satellite feed. And if you're gonna go to those extremes, you might as well just patch in the incoming satellite feed of the game instead of the ESPN audio. -- -- Ben Scripps [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Like TV only smarter. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
