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1K views 13 replies 8 participants last post by  James Long 
#1 ·
I was watching a DVR'd copy of Penn and Teller, recorded from my local affiliate, KTLA in Los Angeles (The CW). About a minute in, this popped up on the screen for 3-5 seconds. I've Googled it, but only find references to Stephen Colbert. I don't know, maybe this has something to do with him, but I don't think so. I figure it's a sub-channel message for affiliates or DVRs or, I don't know.

What the heck is this?
 

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#2 ·
It looks like a slate of times for when the commercials would be in the 8/31 Late Show. I'd expect to see that on a CBS affiliate ... not a CW affiliate.

The message should have been covered by a local commercial. Sp even on the right channel, people at home seeing the slate is an error at the station.
 
#4 ·
I agree with you both about what this looks like. Here's what's weird to me, though, about it...

1. Colbert is on CBS here, not CW, like you said.
2. I don't watch The Tonight Show, but if that slate is correct, it's 10 minutes of show, 1 minute of commercial, 10 minutes of show, 1 minute of commercial, etc. Is that right?
3. It wasn't late at night, it was prime time here on the West coast; 8pm.
4. It wasn't during a commercial; it was right in the middle of the show, about a minute or two in.

Not a big deal. Nothing nefarious going on. I was curious, is all. Just so many levels of weird...
 
#5 ·
CBS and The CW share the same uplink. (CBS is basically the main operator of The CW after the UPN/WB merger) Someone at your CW affiliate screwed up and switched to the wrong feed.

What you saw is the timings that are sent to CBS affiliates after primetime ends at 11pm ET (8pm PT) before the Late Show starts on the east coast feed at 11:35pm ET (8:30pm PT). Since Colbert is taped on the same day, the timings for the 1 minute local ad breaks aren't known until shortly before airtime.
 
#6 ·
CBS also has ownership of CW (50% if sources are correct).

It is interesting to see networks still using "old school" slates to transmit information to affiliates. I'd expect most of that information to go out of band via the Internet or data feeds. I occasionally see a cue slate for something that is happening next on a wild feed. When the local NBC affiliate messes up a commercial break I normally see an animated NBC logo on a black background.

10 minutes of show one minute of commercial is right if you're looking at local commercials. The national commercials would be counted as part of the "show". Although it seems that there are a lot more local commercials when I have watched Colbert. 7.5 local minutes shown on that slate in an hour. Add the national minutes and there is a lot less show.
 
#7 ·
Thing is The CW in Los Angeles is not at all owners by CBS... that's the odd part. The actual station is a tribune station. It would make more sense if this has happened on KCAL 9 which is the other station owned by CBS in this market.

It's all very convoluted in this particular instance.
 
#8 ·
The network feeds have nothing to do with who owns the individual stations. CBS uplinks both the feeds for its own network and for The CW, along with CBS's Decades subchanel. After the merger, CBS's "UPN" took control over most of the day to day technical operations.

For redundancy the receivers are wired into all the possible CBS uplinks, just in case The CW has to originate from a different feed. So somebody at KTLA's control can easily switch to one of CBS's network feeds by selecting the wrong PID or transponder. Since KCAL is independent, it wouldn't really happen to them as their syndicated shows are delivered earlier in the day either via wild feeds or IP.

It's not just CBS that does this, nearly every channel distributes receivers that can be hooked up to multiple satellite positions at the same time. On certain days each month, you might see bars and tones late at night on some cable channels owned by the same broadcaster, they're actually testing what they call "disaster recovery" and the receiver at the headend is being switched between various feeds. (i.e. during Sandy several networks who had their uplinks on Long Island and New Jersey and had to evacuate, which is why for about a week all of Showtime's channels became simulcasts from a backup facility, ESPN also had a disaster recovery plan for Sandy in the event that they lost power in Bristol where programming would be produced out of their LA studio and the channels would be uplinked from Burbank with the Disney Channels and sent out an alert warning affiliates that if it were to happen, Monday Night Football would go off the air for a few minutes during the switchover, Fox Sports had a similar thing back during Hurricane Rita where all the Fox owned FSN stations became simulcasts with the only breakaway being for live games)
 
#9 ·
How does that process work for situations where CBS and CW are on different stations. For example, can independently owned CBS WCAX in Burlington see the CW feeds and can Hearst-owned NBC/CW WPTZ-1/2 Plattsburgh, NY see the CBS master feeds? Boston is the same way (CW is sister with the for-now NBC).
 
#11 ·
ejbvt said:
How does that process work for situations where CBS and CW are on different stations. For example, can independently owned CBS WCAX in Burlington see the CW feeds and can Hearst-owned NBC/CW WPTZ-1/2 Plattsburgh, NY see the CBS master feeds? Boston is the same way (CW is sister with the for-now NBC).
The bulk of the network feeds aren't encrypted, so it doesn't matter who owns what affiliate in a given market. There's actually nothing technical stopping your CBS affiliate from showing CW, ABC or NBC. Fox is another story though because they encode their signal differently, you would have to do a lot more than accidently tune to the wrong transponder and PID to broadcast one of Fox's network feeds.
 
#12 ·
James Long said:
It is interesting to see networks still using "old school" slates to transmit information to affiliates. I'd expect most of that information to go out of band via the Internet or data feeds. I occasionally see a cue slate for something that is happening next on a wild feed. When the local NBC affiliate messes up a commercial break I normally see an animated NBC logo on a black background.
Even if they send that info out of band or coded between frames like closed captioning, they would need to have the old school slates until every single one of their affiliates can handle the newer more automated process. Even then, they might continue inserting the slates as a manual back up in case something goes wrong. i.e. if it is distributed via internet, what if someone is running a backhoe in the wrong place and takes out a station's internet link? Or if they have an automated system that can read the info coded between frames and automatically insert local ads, what if it goes down?
 
#13 ·
By way of comparison, here's NBC's version, from 1999. This would flip every 10-15 seconds between a slate with the timings for Leno, Conan, and the 1:35 show (either "Later" or "Friday Night"). The word they're using there to describe the local commercial availabilities is actually "co-op" as in "cooperative," not "coop" as in chicken.

 
#14 ·
slice1900 said:
Even if they send that info out of band or coded between frames like closed captioning, they would need to have the old school slates until every single one of their affiliates can handle the newer more automated process. Even then, they might continue inserting the slates as a manual back up in case something goes wrong. i.e. if it is distributed via internet, what if someone is running a backhoe in the wrong place and takes out a station's internet link? Or if they have an automated system that can read the info coded between frames and automatically insert local ads, what if it goes down?
That is a lot of what ifs ... and all I said was it was interesting to see slates.
 
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