Royals-Mets World Series Game Shows Vulnerability of Sports to Tech Glitches
Major sporting events are increasingly vulnerable to technology.
— -- While countless hours of preparation are dedicated to major broadcast sports events, incidents like that of the outage at the World Series Game 1 on Tuesday night exemplify Murphy's Law -- if it can go wrong, it will.
For about four minutes, millions of television viewers couldn't watch the Mets play the Royals. At the bottom of the fourth inning, when the Royals were at bat, the picture disappeared.
"A rare electronics failure caused both the primary and backup generators inside the FOX Sports production compound to lose power," Fox Sports said in a statement.
A backup generator should have been up and running when the first broke down, but it didn't in this instance. Fox tweeted at 9:21 p.m. that it was working on fixing the issue "ASAP."
"The issue was immediately addressed, although it resulted in the audience missing one at-bat during the time needed to switch to carriage of Major League Baseball’s international feed, powered by a different generator on site," Fox Sports noted in its statement.
The issue affected the video-replay system.
"The on-field delay was due to replay capability being lost in both teams' clubhouses," Fox stated. "We apologize for the interruption in tonight’s coverage and are working to ensure that the remainder of the World Series is broadcast without incident.”
It's not the first time a technical glitch has caused a disruption to a major sports game. During the 2013 Super Bowl, a blackout in the stadium caused a 34-minute delay in play between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens. Entergy, the utility company supplying power to the Superdome in New Orleans that day, said the issue was an electrical relay device that was designed to protect the Superdome equipment in a cable failure between the switchgear and the stadium.
During the Super Bowl, “the relay device triggered, signaling a switch to open when it should not have, causing the partial outage,” Entergy said at the time, adding that the device was removed from service.
At the Super Bowl, people wondered if terrorism was a cause, while the FBI assured the public it was not.
"At all times, Entergy's distribution and transmission feeders were serving the Mercedes-Benz Superdome," the company said at the time, ESPN reported.
A spokesman for Fox Sports said the 2013 Super Bowl outage "doesn't compare at all" to last night's incident.
Fox's hardware firepower to broadcast the World Series includes 39 cameras (including eight robotic cameras, two super slo-mo cameras and one aerial camera), 12 multi-channel replay devices with 70 channels of record and playback and 80 microphones. Fox reportedly pays Major League Baseball an average of $500 million a year under an eight-year broadcast deal that includes the World Series.
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