We’ve seen plenty of TV signals lost over the years, and also some notable cases where it’s just the audio that gets lost. The most recent case of the latter comes from TNT, which aired a UEFA Champions League play-off round match between Cyprus’ APOEL and the Netherlands’ Ajax Tuesday. That spawned some complaints on Twitter. Here are some clips of an apparent outage early in the second half; the last audible comment from the announcer is “There he is, to the left of your picture” at 49:12 on the match clock, and then the broadcast just goes to crowd and on-pitch noise until the announcer comes back with “easily beaten in the air” around 53:08.
It always seems a little odd when a broadcast returns mid-stream with no acknowledgement that there were technical difficulties, but Champions League broadcasts often involve one feed picked up by broadcasters in multiple countries. It’s possible the issue only came with the transmission of the feed to the U.S. rather than with the feed overall. (And international feed pickups come with their own technical hurdles, which can lead to situations like this occurring more frequently than with domestic broadcasts.) At any rate, these outages happen, and losing the announcers is less significant than losing the full feed. But this was still unfortunate for those watching.
[Clippit]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.