I vaguely recall an explanation of a prior incident like this. The signal on the channel fails, and the equipment automatically switches to a feed that has a test pattern. But the technicians present had switched the test pattern feed to a porn channel so they could watch it. The channel fails, and hilarity ensues. So the technicians shouldn’t have switched from the test patterns, but they didn’t deliberately broadcast the porn.
I know that’s very vague, and I don’t know anything about TV broadcasting so it may be complete nonsense. But is anything like that possible?
Note the Super Bowl channel does freeze for a second or two before the porn appears.
I hope the workers responsible weren’t fired. Mistakes like that can happen, especially if the only porn outlet the company offers the employees is on the test channel. It’s a surprise this hasn’t happened more often before. The broadcast company should have a separate television hooked up at the station that broadcasts porn, and isn’t linked to the main feed.
If one’s work is editing X-rated films, then yes. But at a TV station? Uh-uh. Preserving the integrity of the on-air look (Deal or No Deal notwithstanding) is the highest priority. If it turns out someone was watching porn instead of monitoring the on-air shows, and that the porn made it on air, you can bet that person is going to get fired.
I used to work for a company that was the dominant industry player in the equipment that switched one feed to another, usually for commercials or the next program. It had to manage syncing the signal and other stuff like that so there would not be any missed frames.
In fact, I thought the 1 second Miller commercial I saw during the game was the result of jsut such an error and said so at the time. Later I saw that Anheuser-Busch has long paid for category exclusivity, so that reinforces “mistake” to me.
Comcast has adult feeds in the studio for pay per view I would assume.
In both cases, the configuration could have been messed up in the same way. The UI certainly sucked when I was there (among other things I can take some credit for making sure tv stations across North America and maybe around the world did not go haywire for this reason due to y2k). You are welcome, see how that 21st Century is working out so far?
There are other reasons this could happen of course, but misconfiguration of the actual schedule for this piece of equipment which is at every station and head-end is a very viable possibility.
I am no comcast fan, that is for sure, but I see nothing nefarious in porn being there.
More nefarious is that the local NBC affiliate in Baltimore apparently is contracted to show the lottery drawing live every night, and that caused viewers there to see Springsteen’s halftime show reduced to a tiny corner of their screen.
Are we sure this is porn, as in actual adult film X-rated professionally acted and not some employee with a camera and a grudge who decided to film himself and his girlfriend in case the Cardinals scored?
I noticed it happened in Arizona, and right after the Cardinals scored. I wonder if that was a coincidence?
I’m sure, b/c I’ve seen the NSFW link…and I remember the guy. He was in some special on HBO about married porn stars. I remember b/c they were so frank about enjoying filming porn together, and there was a scene they were filming where the wife was painted blue.
Oh, and I also remember him from a bunch of actual porn.
He is Evan Stone, one of the most well known quasi-mainstream male porn stars out there. He’s been on numerous HBO specials and was the lead in the famous crossover Pirates! film.
What little I can tell it’s part of some Gonzo flick. I recognize the voice of the “director/photographer”, he’s on one of the big porn websites.
I once worked in Master Control at a little TV station and we had two monitors we typically used: a preview monitor and the feed monitor. The feed monitor was what was actually going out at the time and the pre-set was where we’d cue up the next program, commercials, etc. When the time came, you’d press the appropriate button and whatever was on the pre-set went into the live feed. There were lots of other monitors, of course, but these were the two main ones with sound, etc.
On slow nights, it was pretty common to route one of the satellites to the pre-set monitor and watch other programming instead of whatever we were playing. One night, I was watching some music video feed and had to do a quick station ID. I put the ID one the pre-set, fed it into the live feed and then flipped back to my videos. But I flipped back too quickly and it put the music video feed onto the air. Oops! Luckily, I quickly fixed it and I doubt anyone significant noticed. Everyone else was treated to ten seconds of Pink Floyd in the middle of the late night movie.
We were able to get Cinemax on the satellites though so it was a lucky break that I wasn’t watching 11pm soft core porn instead of music videos.
