Twitter Eats Big Media’s Lunch
On Saturday night, like millions of other people, I turned on TBS to watch the Red Sox/Rays game. I watched the pre-game coverage, then, all of a sudden they started playing Dick Clark’s Bloopers. Once that ended, they jumped in to an episode of the Steve Harvey Show. What the…? Could it be a rain delay? Tampa plays in a dome, so nope. Did something horrific happen at the stadium? Nope. I continued to watch TBS for the next 5 minutes waiting for some sort of update or screen crawl explaining what happened. Nothing. Finally, I pulled out my iPhone and went to search.twitter.com and entered “TBS” in the search field. Right away I saw the hundreds of messages of people trying to figure out what was going on. Within 3 minutes, I had links to boston.com and other websites that explained there was a router failure in Atlanta. Some Twitter users at the game started doing live play by play updates so that we would know what was happening on the field. Another user pointed me to a hidden gem on the MLB site called “four corners” where you can watch a live 4-camera mosaic of the game in a live video feed.
While I was getting all this useful information, I kept checking TBS.com, CNN.com and MSNBC.com to see if there were any updates. There weren’t. I kept watching TBS waiting for them to update their audience. Finally, at 5:19 PM PT - 25 minutes after they dumped out of the game coverage - there was a crawl apologizing for the the technical difficulties.
I looked to every major media outlet I could find to give me some answers to what was going on, and none did. Surely it was newsworthy that Game 6 of the ALCS was blacked out due to technical failure. Apparently not. In fact, it took nearly a half hour for TBS to give their audience any update. Through the use of Twitter, however, we had crowdsourced the problem and found multiple workarounds to get us the game information we all wanted. How many hundreds of millions of dollars do the major news outlets have tied up in broadcast equipment, staff and internet technology? Apparently, all the money in the world still can’t replace good ole’ fashioned human cooperation. THAT is the beauty, and true power, of social media.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I am no Twitter fanboy. I’ve been hard on them about their shortcomings and their infrastructure meltdowns. Over the last couple of months they’ve really gotten their act together. It’s a good thing too - otherwise how would all of us baseball fans have gotten the answers we needed during a time of TV crisis?
UPDATE: I received this from TBS Tuesday at 12:29 PM PT about the outage:
“On Saturday two circuit breakers in our Atlanta transmission operations tripped causing the master router and its backup - which are necessary to transmit any incoming feed outbound - to shut down. This impacted our live feed for baseball from being distributed to any of the other networks in the Turner portfolio and caused the delay in our coverage. Both our primary and backup routers were impacted by this problem. We apologize to baseball fans for this mishap that caused a delay in our coverage.”
6 Comments, Comment or Ping
peter bordes
That is the truth. Mass media is not able to plug into the new ME media generation. stories are created and syndicated faster thru social channels than traditional. i think we are about to see some very interesting new forms of news coming from social to traditional.
Oct 24th, 2008
Scott Parent
Yes Peter - to that point - look at what CNN has done with their iReporters. Ordinary people with still and video cameras can submit their stuff to CNN. Quite frankly, some of the most compelling content I’ve seen recently has come from these types of reports.
Very cool that at least one mass media outlet recognizes and uses the power of new media.
Oct 24th, 2008
peter bordes
this is the beginning! and its about time. if other traditional media co’s dont get cracking they are going to be eating dirt. hmmmmm sounds like more acquisitions coming (non ad network)
Oct 25th, 2008
Bernie Borges
As a P.S. to this story, I observed that the Tampa Bay Rays have a Twitter profile but they were absent from the #rays party during game 6 and 7 of the ALCS. I blogged about it here:
http://www.findandconvert.com/blog/2008/fans-threw-a-twitter-party-tampa-bay-rays/
Nov 2nd, 2008
Russell
Scott - See current.com and the current TV network for an even better example of how the compelling nature of user-generated content generally trumps networks - at least for me.
Nov 2nd, 2008
Esteban Kolsky
Scott,
This was very well done. I am fairly new to twitter, but getting an understanding of how it works and what i can do. i had my ideas coming in, but i can see how wrong i was.
thanks for a clearly written example of how twitter works, yet one more of many useful ways.
thanks
esteban
ps - in the old days this was done, if you recall, by phone… you’d call your friends, one-by-one, and someone eventually would know the answer and the communication would start the other way… interesting how we progressed and eliminate the latency out of our communications - that is the best thing that i see with twitter.
Nov 2nd, 2008
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