I think I asked this once before but have forgotten what the responses were:
Back in the days prior to everyone having cable every so often in the middle of a program a test screen would pop up claiming technical difficulties and the channel would go off the air while they fixed it. It’s been decades since I’ve seen this. Don’t stations have equipment failures anymore?
Also, many times the test pattern had an image of a Native American on it. Why?
The wiki page has a pretty detailed discussion of how the card was used by technicians to fine-tune the picture and sound. Why the Indian head? Well, they needed a picture of something, and they thought it looked cool.
It still happens but it works differently. Even see a sudden and out of place cut to a commercial sometimes after a brief pause? Sometimes a backup location would then come on (and sometimes explain what is happening) if the main one can’t be bright back online fast enough. Occasionally it will cut to some generic program.
That particular test card was developed by RCA in 1939. Each part of the test card serves a specific purpose. The large circle allows you to adjust the overall image so that it fits properly in the screen. The smaller circles at the corners allow you to adjust the focus of the beam at the edges of the screen. The Indian head is used to adjust brightness and contrast. I don’t know why they specifically chose the Indian head, but it needed to be an image with enough detail, complexity, and shading so that it could be used for brightness and contrast adjustments.
Originally the Indian head alone was used as a test pattern. It was later incorporated into the more complex pattern that you linked to.
Wikipedia page:
From a technical point of view, the Indian head test pattern became obsolete with color television. Many broadcasters still used it though just out of tradition, often using it for sign-off or for a background when the station was having technical difficulties.
When the U.S. transitioned from analog to digital TV in 2009, many stations used the Indian head as their last transmission image before the analog station was shut down completely.
The original opening for Second City Television (back when it was first starting out as a half hour show) had a “gag” version of the Test Pattern, with the Indian laughing
I’ve heard rumors that late at night after local TV stations shut down for testing they would start back up and play porn. Might be just an urban legend I think almost all local stations are now on 24/7.
Plus the recordings themselves are all digital. Back in the day, you had a bank of video cassette players which, while far sturdier than the ones people had in their homes, were still mechanical devices that could fail. And you’d have to switch between them when you went to commercials or otherwise changed what was being played. Machines break, tapes jam, might be something as dumb as pulling a tape and realizing it was never rewound and will take three minutes to rewind when you have 90 seconds left. None of that’s an issue now that it’s all digital files.
That’s part of it (valves = British term for vacuum tubes) but in general many other advances have made equipment not just solid-state, but much more compact and reliable.
Go back a little further and it gets even more complicated than that, when early videotape recorders were gigantic, very complicated reel-to-reel monsters!
Below, for instance, is an illustrated history of the first commercial videotape recorder, introduced by Ampex in 1956. It cost the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars in today’s money, weighed about a ton, and as you can tell from the pics, it was a very complex and intricate machine, yet its only purpose was to record and play back black-and-white television video and monaural audio – something you can do much better today with a laptop computer, in high-definition, color, and multichannel sound. If you look at some of the pics part way down, you can see how elaborate the controls and adjustments were. That small screen with the hood around it that looks like a miniature television screen is not a video monitor (that was separate) – it’s a specialized oscilloscope, used IIRC for fine-tuning the video head alignment. That’s how intricate this stuff was in those days.
The same kinds of big advances were made everywhere else – cameras, control room equipment, etc. – eventually leading to a far more reliable infrastructure.
I’m old enough to remember that exact “Indian-head” test pattern. It would come on after a station signed off, accompanied by a continuous tone. It’s very nostalgic!
I used to work as a television transmission controller (and still work in the industry). Yes the process is totally digital now and there are multiple redundancies as has been already suggested. They might typically run an A chain which is on air and a simultaneous and totally independent B chain which the controller can jump over to in case something in the A chain breaks. Easy to do in a digital suite but not possible to do with tape without setting up a separate room with a new set of employees mirroring the on air suite - not going to happen.
The other thing that might make a channel fall over is an outside line - i.e. a live feed via satellite or a cable. These are far more secure now - you just don’t get many drop outs. In some cases there are also redundancy lines, or alternative options.
Plus if something really is suddenly unavailable, with a digital server holding hundreds of hours of footage, the operator can simply show some filler or go to a break. No need to have a test card on screen while you scrabble around fixing a tape or finding something else.
I watch a lot of curling which is broadcast live and technical difficulties that result in the loss of picture and/or sound are not uncommon. Almost always fixed within a few minutes. They often break for a local commercial when that happens.
One of our local TV stations had a legendary technical failure a couple of years ago when the master studio panel in the control room failed right at the beginning of the 6:00 news First the screen went blank. Then a slide with the station logo came up. Then they played 11 straight minutes of commercials and promo announcements (Yes, I timed it - it was like watching a train wreck.) Finally, they got a remote camera and microphone working, and the entire news team huddled around, passing the microphone around like a joint.
A couple of days ago I was watching TBS when the program started looping around to the same spot. After about 60 seconds of the same two lines of dialog playing over and over, they cut for a very long commercial break. When they came back they picked up the program several scenes later.
Not broadcast but in the theater, decades ago the sound went out for the last five minutes of the feature. The image was there fine, just no sound. The feature ended, the credits started rolling and almost everyine got up to leave, but about a dozen of us stuck it out.
Sure enough, before the credits’ end was reached, the screen went black then after another couple minutes the house lights went dim and it picked up – with sound – within a couple minutes where things had gone wrong before.
The projection booth was at the same height at the lobby and when I left, the door was open. I stuck my head in to say, “Thank you!” and the guy gave me a thumbs up.
I think the last time I saw a really awkward BBC “technical difficulty” was some time in the 60s. And then there was the power-cut the night they launched BBC2
And even semiconductors have gotten more reliable. This is the thing I worked on for 35 years. In our systems, the billion transistor microprocessors were significantly more reliable than the power supplies and fans.
And I’m sure redundancy built into the transmitters helps also. The cost of failures is high enough to make this worthwhile.
The last time I saw one of these messages was when Colbert’s character did or said something offensive and they cut to the technical difficulties screen as part of the joke.
