Saturday, February 12, 2011

The black hole that is TV

I mentioned the other day that was excited because I recorded an old Mets game from 2000, against Atlanta. I was really looking forward to watching it. But last night I tried to watch it and found yet another example of the Great American Decline.

The game began normally and continued for about three minutes, at which point the recording screwed up and the screen went black. After a moment they went to commercial. After at least six minutes of commercials, they came back to the game, beginning at the same point where it began the last time. And it continued for about three minutes, screen went black, and they went back to another slew of commercials. And then it came back on and did the same thing again!

At this point, I realized nobody was home at the station. This was being robo-presented and they didn't even have a staff person watching to see how things were going. It probably continued that way for the entire game, with the computer seeing black screen and automatically switching to a commercial. The robot didn't know anything was wrong, and with no one monitoring the robot, it just continued along the same loop of failure. I deleted the game without going any further because of the hopeless nitwits that run the MLB station.

This is one of the reasons why TV is such a black hole: nobody's home.