It Brings a City Together

This evening, a good portion of Pittsburgh sat down to watch their beloved Penguins hopefully finally put away the Philedelphia Flyers in their opening series of the playoffs.

Maybe halfway through the first period, we had a glimmer of what was coming. A blast of Twitters proclaimed that Comcast had a bit of a hiccup during the commercials.

Then it happened. Fresh into the second period. We went dark on my Dish Network based television. The Twitter verse exploded and I think I heard crying echoing through the hills of Beechview…

Was it Comcast? Was it FSN? Is this another dastardly NBC plan to piss off Pittsburgh?

Soon, Twitter had answers…

itsonlyjim Lightning strike hit FSN transmission site in Atlanta. Comcast CAN route VS feed on air but is apparently choosing not to.

Everyone responded, and retweeted to their unconnected friends. The screen was confirmed to still have the feed. So the expected downtown riot did not happen. Though I’d be interested in the stats on bar fights during the outage.

At least Mike Lange didn’t fail us.

Nor did the internet.

Soon, there was another flurry of these “grey area” feeds of the Versus coverage of the game, which was not available to area subscribers thanks to blackout rules with FSN.

burghbaby @unclecrappy I’ve got a quote for you. “Twitter came through for me when FSN was busy sucking big hairy donkey balls.”

FSN was called everyting from an embarrassment to the reason the Pens lost what should have been a shoe in series. (Lets be honest. It is almost karmic…) But they werent’ the only ones to get caught up with the digital scuffle…

ChachiSays @comcastcares if you really cared reroute the effing game!

comcastcares @ChachiSays We are not permitted. We do not own the rights to the game. It would be a big legal issue

So props for that rep to stand up to a pissed off city when I hear they weren’t even able to start to respond to the angry phone calls…

It’s one of those events where you can see how this new medium comes through when our conventional means don’t. Rather than sitting here, staring our our blank TVs, speculating what happened for maybe 20 minutes, information got around. Instead of calling one or two friends, of which I received from a coworker not in the loop, everyone passed along info, asked questions, and got answers. And in the end, all of the speculation was confirmed by FSN themselves as they apologized well into the third period.