Wasn’t shown on live TV here in southern CA at 9pm (midnight NY time). Did networks have to pay to show it and they refused?
I don’t remember ever seeing it live when I lived out west, although that was 20 years ago. It was always taped and shown so the ball dropped at midnight local time.
CNN carried it live.
Same here. I used to see it live when I lived the east, but now I live in the Mountain time zone. They show it at midnight local time. Who wants to watch it drop at 10 PM?
Maybe some of the networks dropped the ball on this.
The networks don’t air it out west until midnight Pacific time - and even at that, not all of them do it. I think just NBC and ABC did this year; Fox had something from Miami, and if CBS aired anything, its San Francisco station didn’t show it.
CNN has aired the ball drop live since 2000 (which was also the only time a network aired it live in the west; ABC had all-day coverage of live worldwide celebrations). There may be other live ball drops on cable, but CNN is the only one I am sure of. Before 2000, it was about 50/50 as to whether or not CNN would air the drop live, and even when it did, it was just the last 30 seconds or so.
Back in the 1970s, it was usually New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on ABC, Guy Lombardo’s show on CBS (both of which had the ball drop), and a Tonight Show episode on NBC (one year, back when Times Square replaced the ball with a giant apple, Johnny Carson “celebrated” midnight by dropping an apple in front of his desk at midnight).
They got leap second confused with leap hour and did it at 1 am when you’d already passed out from excess <whatever>. 
I distinctly remembered Dick Clark’s New Years Rocking Eve was a national party for young people who weren’t going to watch PBS show Guy Lombardo (that’s what my parents thought was required for New Year’s.)
At any rate, they cut away from the ball – in those days, an actual metal sphere, lowered by hand down a flagpole – after it was dropped (only 2 or 3 seconds off from exactly midnight, there were pretty good) to show us Erin Moran and Donny Osmond ( stars of popular ABC shows in that era) who told us they had some hours to go before they experienced New Years.
Doesn’t that happen these days? Can’t Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper generate the same buzz with Ryan Seacrest at the helm?
Sounds of crickets chirping
Bueler? Anyone?
Maybe our culture has advanced without us noticing?
CNN most certainly did at midnight Pacific time. They re-aired the NYC countdown and ball drop on the west coast six minutes early.
Perhaps Don Lemon’s drunk incident while broadcasting from New Orleans scared the Atlanta CNN producers.
Ryan needed Mariah Carey’s help this year for that.
They must’ve gotten really confused, since the leap second was 6:59:60 EST, or five hours before midnight.