Worldwide Annoyance At Euro 2008 Power Cut
Last night, a global crisis occurred. The football went off air. Breathe deeply and hold someone’s hand as we look at how the world coped.
As you’ll know, the Euro 2008 championships have been taking place in Switzerland and Austria. So far, everything’s gone without a hitch, perhaps helped considerably by England’s absence from the competition. Last night was perhaps the best match of the tournament so far, the semi-final between Germany and Turkey. In the 58th minute of yesterday’s match, just as the match looked as if it was turning into a thriller, television pictures around the world began to break up, eventually freezing.
The worldwide community immediately began to publish their annoyance. Here’s a sample of some of the many tweets;
ESPN has lost the feed to what’s turned out to be a stellar finish in the Germany/Turkey Euro 2008 game. Nice work.
Who put Twitter in charge of retransmitting the Euro 2008 Championship?
In Britain, coverage of the competition is shared between the BBC and ITV. Last night’s semi-final was being covered by the BBC, who almost immediately switched to BBC Radio 5 Livecommentary whilst displaying an apology caption. The speed in which they did this suggests they were expecting the feed to drop.
In the 63rd minute, The Guardian, who were live blogging the match on their website posted;
TV pictures are down in Montreal and Rome too. And France. And Germany. It’s a global meltdown, people!
In France, TF1 crossed to a dark, half empty studio just in time to capture the presenter running to his desk and fixing his ear piece in to make an apology. Luckily, someone managed to capture this moment.
In Norway, they showed a still caption whilst the pitch side commentator continued to relay the match events via mobile phone. A channel in Hong Kong also resorted to using a mobile phone, only they didn’t have a mobile available and had to borrow one from a spectator. Austria’s ORF1 went completely black for a time before dumping back into the match as if nothing had happened. In Germany, where viewers were no doubt pulling their hair out and gnashing their teeth, ZDF rebroadcast SF (Swiss TV) footage complete with the SF logo in the top left-hand corner. In the USA, ESPN returned to the studio for a chat before the pictures returned. Unusually though, their feed dropped completely a while later and they weren’t able to broadcast the final moments of the match. In Belgian, VT4 and La Deux managed to get pictures back but without any sound. According to The Guardian, most other countries around the world decided that at times such as these, the best thing to do is put on some adverts. It seems the only broadcasters whose coverage went unaffected, and who was able to broadcast Germany’s second goal was SF and oddly, Al Jazeera.
In all, there were three outages caused by a violent electrical storm in Vienna which cut the power to the international broadcast centre. Despite the match taking place in Basel, Switzerland, the pictures are sent via Vienna, Austria and then sent via satellite to broadcasters all over the world. The storm was so violent that 22,000 fans were evacuated from Vienna’s ‘fan zone’, where fans were watching the match via a big screen.
Back in Britain, coverage of the rest of the second half was clumsy at best. The picture dropped on numerous occasions, with commentary flicking between that of Radio 5 Live and the TV commentators. At times, the audio lagged behind the pictures resulting in commentators describing events that had already occurred. With an absence of on-screen scores or timer, it had seemed the Beeb had managed to source an alternative clean feed from somewhere, although no one had told the commentary team who continued to apologise for the picture-loss despite the pictures having returned.
So far, the BBC have received 154 complaints from viewers, with the BBC along with Germany’s ZDF lodging an official complaint with UEFA.
It was a shame as this match was quite clearly the match of the competition so far. Obviously, it was a fair result, but it doesn’t feel fair. Turkey’s play was much more creative, much more courageous and much more fun to watch. They were probably the better side. But Germany showed patience and resilience and managed to reach the final with a late goal.
So, what happened where you live? How did your national broadcaster cope with the loss of pictures? Were you in Vienna when the storm hit? Sound off in the comments.
