Last night my wife and I were out to dinner with her parents at the local Applebee’s. One of the TVs in my field of vision was tuned to some sports channel (I think it was FS1) which had the most bizarre CC glitch I’d ever seen. The same half dozen or so lines kept repeating over and over, for the entire hour and a half that we were there.
There were at least two different programs that were on during that time, both of them auto racing shows, and the same CC loop ran during both shows. The CC text, which not only kept repeating but was also garbled, appeared to be possibly from a basketball broadcast. (One of the lines was something about shooting, or taking a shot.)
But here’s the strangest part: during commercial breaks, the CC worked fine for the ads. As soon as it went back to the program, the weird garbled CC loop started up again.
Any Closed Captioning experts out there who can explain?
Was it a live event? Maybe the closed captionust had a stroke/heart attack and was slumped over the keyboard, gasping for breath as his life slipped slowly away…
One of the programs was a “live” event (a race) but I’m pretty sure it was pre-recorded.
I know what you mean about the heart attack/stroke thing though. One of our local news stations has someone doing the CC where sometimes you get a long string of a single repeating letter, or “test test test” over and over. I have visions of the guy slumped over his keyboard, asleep or dead.
I don’t have an answer, but I’ve noticed that sometimes the last line of the captioning during the show (especially the news) will “hang” or persist on the screen during the commercial break until the show resumes.
I saw this exact thing a week ago. Talking heads on some sports channel, and the same caption was repeated every 10 seconds or so. A line of words mixed with gibberish would appear, then half of it would get erased, then more words would replace the erasure, then a new line would appear, and then it would repeat.
So whatever was going on seems to be more than just a one-time incident. Unless that guy was slumped over in his chair for a week before someone found him.
I watch a lot of TV with the sound off. I’ve seen that before. It’s usually the local stations around here. I can see that sports channels would have more problems than say, a movie.
I’ve told this story before, but I once was watching the local news on a medium-size network affiliate station and the closed caption just kept scrolling something like this “Your trial copy of Acme Newsroom Software 2.0 has expired. If you would like to subscribe please call Acme Customer Service at 1-800-…” (Not the real name.)
I don’t know. But I have a suspicion that either nobody was watching the closed caption feed or there was no tech on duty that night who knew how to reboot the system or knew the admin password. More and more TV and radio operations are automated and they have either no staff or minimal staff on hand when they are just running pre-recorded shows. Or they may just have one intern watching five different feeds.
No idea why specifically that error happened, but if you want to know about closed captioning in general, the Technology Connections channel on Youtube made this video recently that has some interesting details about the basic technology that problem involved.