Arguably the biggest sporting night America, you don’t want to experience a power cut during the Super Bowl, but that is what many fans believed had happened last night.
But in actual fact the brief darkness was down to a ‘brief equipment failure’ NBC has claimed, during a commercial break in the first half, so instead of any of the all-important ads, viewers just saw a black screen.
NBC insists that no commercial time nor game time was missed. If it had lost ad time, the seconds could have cost millions of ad dollars, considering a 30-second spot has been quoted to cost $5m.
Users of the NBC app or NBC’s livestream on its website also experienced other difficulties, such as seeing several commercial breaks where the screen would reach a ‘Coverage will resume momentarily’ message.
Seizing the opportunity, Tide continued its theme of being in every part of the Super Bowl tonight by tweeting that the nearly 30 second blackout could be a Tide ad. The outage appeared widespread as many on Twitter used the hashtag #blackout to talk about the black screen they were seeing.
These were not the only technical issues that took place throughout Super Bowl 52, as subscription video on demand service Hulu, saw some disruption within its live TV service, which cut off the end of the game in some markets during the climactic final moments of the Eagles/Patriots game.
Tom Brady was making a last-ditch push down the field in hopes of tying the 41-33 contest when Hulu customers lost all video and audio from NBC and US Bank Stadium. Not everyone experienced the abrupt cutoff, which occurred at approximately 10:00pm.
But those who did received an error screen before the game’s conclusion. Error messages ranged from ‘no content available’ to one that said the game couldn’t be shown due to rights restrictions.
The company said there had been ‘a technical issue’ and said users could restart their Hulu app to restore the game feed. Several of Hulu’s internet TV competitors including Sling TV and YouTube TV didn’t experience the same service interruption.
PlayStation Vue had some of its own reliability problems, however. Nearly all of the services encountered minor snags like jumping back a few seconds every so often or occasional buffering. Internet TV still isn’t quite as rock solid for sports as an OTA antenna or cable, it seems.
