Well, if you were watching Germany-Turkey in the semifinals of Euro 2008 on ESPN or any other outlet from around the world, you know about the technical glitches that marred the last sixteen minutes of the second half including stoppage time.
Apparently, thunderstorms knocked out the transmission of the game from the Euro 2008 International Broadcast Center in Vienna, Austria even though the game was played in Basel, Switzerland.
During that stretch, three goals were scored including the game winner by Germany in the 90th minute. The picture came back off and on, but when the picture went out for good just after the goal by Phillip Lahm of Germany, viewers around the world missed the last five minutes of stoppage time.
Neil Best of Newsday tries to put the glitch into perspective.
The New York Post TV Sports blog says viewers missed a great finish.
ESPN had to rely on its studio show with Rece Davis, Julie Foudy and Tommy Smyth to fill time and to report that Germany’s Miroslav Klose had scored to put Germany up, 2-1. The picture came back just after Turkey scored to tie, 2-2, then another glitch occured forcing ESPN to scramble in studio once again. Video returned in time for Derek Rae and Andy Gray to see the winning goal by Lahm, but the picture went out for good causing ESPN to show pictures of the Euro 2008 fan zone outside the stadium and miss the entire stoppage period.
ESPN says it’s re-airing the game in its entirety without the technical glitches three more times this week including on ESPN Classic tonight.
William Houston of the Toronto Globe and Mail writes that TSN also had to fill in the blanks.
Paul J. Gough of the Hollywood Reporter says all of the world’s feeds except for Swiss TV and Al-Jazeera (?) were affected by the outage.
Over in the UK, Graham Tibbets of the London Telegraph says BBC viewers were angered by the glitch.
Alana Semuels writes in the Los Angeles Times’ Technology blog that lightning wiped out BOTH the primary and secondary feeds of the game.
The lesson? Make sure you have a third feed of the game just in case.
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