Network Affiliate Airing "Wrong" Network?

[Stanislav]

A post in another thread reminded me of this.....I had actually posted this maybe a couple of years ago, when I first found this board, but I believe at the time the "old regime" deleted it for reasons unknown.....Back in the mid-70's, living in Central Florida, I noted a series of strange doin's on the local network affiliates. You would be watching a show on, say, the NBC affiliate. All of a sudden, without warning, the video would switch to the CBS network feed for a few seconds, then back again!!This happened at least half a dozen times that I personally witnessed, in various combinations of networks. Asking around, I found a couple of colleagues who had noted similar oddities.I finally asked one of the local CEs about it, and he was well aware of the problem. He claimed that the problem was in Atlanta, where in the Long Lines era there was a regional switching center that would, for instance, feed regional commercials intended for just the Southern affiliates. He said it was simply a matter of someone there "punching the wrong button at the wrong time."I never saw this happen before or since those few months in the 70's. Has anyone else seen this phenomenon occur, or has an alternate explanation?

 

[azumanga]

Someone told me of one case in Lansing, Michigan in the late-1970s (I think), when NBC affil WILX and CBS affil WJIM (now WLNS) got the other station's network for a few minutes on one afternoon -- for example, "Young and Restless" on WILX, and "Days Of Our Lives" on WJIM.

 

[MarcB]

Last summer was watcthing something on ABC affiliated WTNH and during a commercial break they switched to UPN for a moment and then switched back. UPN is on sister station WCTX.

 

[Stanislav]

Last summer was watcthing something on ABC affiliated WTNH and during a commercial break they switched to UPN for a moment and then switched back. UPN is on sister station WCTX.

I can see that quite easily happening with co-owned stations that are probably sharing the same facilities. I was alluding more to something that is beyond the affiliate's control, such as the examples from the 70's that I cited.

 

[davect]

On the cable TV side: About 8 years ago CBS was accidentally patched into the transmission path for the Discovery Channel west coast feed. For a few minutes Discovery's west coast viewers were treated to "The Price Is Right".

 

[rwells2265]

Back in the days when some rural network affils took "feeds" over the air from distant stations, atmospheric conditions sometimes caused spontaneous instances of the 'wrong' network. I've been told of numerous incidents of then WSLA-TV 8 in Selma, Ala. (today CBS affil WAKA in Montgomery) ... back in the '60s when WSLA was ABC, they took network programs off the air from WBRC-6 in Birmingham, ~90 miles to the north. But, due to the lower terrain and strong e-skip tendencies of the region, often WSLA would spontaneously become CBS ... as WCTV-6 in Thomasville, Ga./Tallahassee, Fla. would override the signal from WBRC. In Troy, where I lived for a number of years, it was a crapshoot as to which audio I could pick up on 87.7 .... and sometimes for grins I'd try to see how quickly I could determine which channel 6 I was getting at a given moment: WBRC or WCTV! --Russell

 

[KML0224]

Last summer was watcthing something on ABC affiliated WTNH and during a commercial break they switched to UPN for a moment and then switched back. UPN is on sister station WCTX.

I can see that quite easily happening with co-owned stations that are probably sharing the same facilities. I was alluding more to something that is beyond the affiliate's control, such as the examples from the 70's that I cited.

WTNH-TV/DT and WCTX-TV/DT are both switched from the LIN Broadcasting hub in Chicopee, MA, outside of Springfield. They also handle WWLP-TV/DT (NBC) channel 22/D 11 in Springfield.