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Previous: CNN news alert | Main | Next: Grinder buttons
January 22, 2004 03:04 AM
Broken: CNN clock
Bill Jackson sends us this picture of the clock shown on CNN at certain interstitial moments during its broadcasts.
The problem is that the clock's hands are always in the same position. Except for two minutes during the day, the clock is always wrong. How hard would it be for CNN actually to display a clock with the correct time? (At least the appropriate number of minutes after the hour?)
Looks like the clock itself is broken. The hour hand is halfway between 10 and 11, but the minute hand is a minute or two past 12. No wonder it can't keep time!
I can see why it seems like it would be easy to show the correct time on the clock, but actually it would be very difficult. I have worked in television environments. Video editors have to render the video clips in advance that are inserted inbetween the broadcasts. These "chunks" of video could be created on the fly, but it requires multi-million dollar machines (which i am sure CNN has), but most importantly it greatly increases the risk that something could go wrong during the live broadcast. CNN has to minimize unnecssary risks and problems during its broadcasts and I'm sure they determined it is better to have an inaccurate clock that will always work than an accurate clock that may result in one of those "Technical Difficulties" messages.
It's also worth pointing out that no working clock would ever
have its hour hand squarely planted between the 10 and 11
while the minute hand points nearly directly to 12.
It's also worth pointing out that what mikeb thought was worth pointing out was already pointed out.
one time i was wathing NBC and the computer actualy froze up and his weather map had the same thing for 15whole minutes than he walked off the screen. Also one time i was watching a live TV show, i forgot what it was called, but they had a little box the poped up on te screen and it ran into an error and what showed up was a volume control on windows 98!
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: CNN news alert | Main | Next: Grinder buttons
It's probably just clip art, and would actually be harder to re-render than to simply leave as it is.
Still, I admit, it's a rather bad choice of clip art...
Posted by: codeman38 at January 23, 2004 10:27 AM