It's 11 p.m. Do you know where your TV station is?

December 1, 2020 11:32 PM

At 11 p.m. tonight, KOIN TV in Portland, OR was apparently off the air. It was not broadcasting OTA, nor on the CBS All Access stream, nor streaming on its own website. It was dark for 17 minutes until it seemed to be joined in progress w/anchors in studio and an budget related OSHA story with a live field reporter.

Then at 11:22 p.m., they went dark again for about 10 seconds during another live field report. They haven't said what caused this. Wondering if anyone has found anything explaining why.

posted by CollectiveMind to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

There are many many reasons why something like this could happen. I would speculate that the feed going dark on both the OTA and online streams would suggest an issue in transmission or master control. Coming back to a live show in progress suggests that the control room did not know they were not on the air.

I'm sure there are many emails flying around that station today trying to get to the bottom of the issue and hold feet to the fire.
posted by soy_renfield at 6:36 AM on December 2, 2020

Coming back to a live show in progress suggests that the control room did not know they were not on the air.

Or they knew there was noting to be done, and changing the schedule by 30 mins is not likely.
posted by terrapin at 7:32 AM on December 2, 2020

@terrapin: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the OP, but it seems like the show had continued to run during the outage. The only reason I can come up with to continue on with a show as scripted in this situation is if you are going to re-air it later in it's entirety. Shrinking a local news broadcast dramatically is done all the time, usually in order to deal with sporting events with unpredictable end times butting up against live programming.
posted by soy_renfield at 11:51 AM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Some stations are fully automatic, so there might not have been a person present to adjust progamming.
posted by theora55 at 12:13 PM on December 2, 2020

Or they knew about the problem and underestimated the amount of time it would be to correct it.
posted by mmascolino at 12:19 PM on December 2, 2020