Thursday, June 19, 2008

Comcast and the Seven Second Delay

I love listening to baseball on the radio so much that I used to watch the game on TV with the volume off and the radio on. Radio announcers have to describe the game using picturesque language, and their description is much better than TV announcers. Some time in the last two decades, I noticed that the game on radio and TV were slightly out of sinc. The TV seemed to have a fraction of a second delay. Once I heard that this was due to radio using land lines while TV had to beam many thousands of miles up to a satellite, creating a slight delay because of the speed of light.

Then a few years ago, I noticed that the TV had about a seven second delay. This is so irritating that it's very difficult to watch the game with the radio on. But at the ballpark, they have used closed circuit TV for years now, so that watching the monitors while standing in line for food or beer resulted in an absolutely live picture. But this year with the changing of Fox Sports to Comcast Sports, the monitors at the park have about a three second delay. What's up with that? With all the increase in technology, you would think Comcast could get it right instead of worse over time.

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