TV's Dirty Little Secret

If you were watching the Super Bowl in Tucson, you may have been surprised by what you saw shortly after Larry Fitzgerald's touchdown in the 4th quarter. For 30 seconds, viewers of Comcast Cable saw images from a porno channel instead of the game. During that time, some adult "parts" were shown.

Comcast has apologized for the incident. In a statement the company says it's been, "working throughout the night," to discover the problem.

While there's a chance that there was some sort of high tech hacking of the Comcast system, I think I have a good idea of what happened as I've seen the same thing occur at TV stations where I worked. In the master control room, an operator is in charge of making sure that the programs are being correctly being sent out. The job can lead to some downtime and often the operator will watch some of the other programming to pass the time. But if that person gets confused and hits the wrong button on the router, the program that they're watching might be broadcast to everyone instead of just to them.

My guess is that the operator was watching the Super Bowl, figured he'd have a few minutes to kill during the post-touchdown commercials and switched over to some adult viewing.

I'll be curious to see if Comcast ever releases any more information on this Super Bowl blunder.