So… last night I was hanging out here at the house, waiting for My Name Is Earl, The Office and 30 Rock to come on. Since the missus and I have a DVR, we often wait until a show is over before watching it, so we can skip the commercials; since we were out of town most of this week, we had a backlog of stuff to watch. So instead of watching The Office live at 9:00PM, we watched Hell’s Kitchen from Tuesday while waiting for The Office to finish recording.
But no. There were some storms in the Charlotte area last night, and our lovely NBC affiliate, WCNC, decided to run 2 hours of “Storm Updates” instead of showing their regular programming. Let me repeat that… instead of showing Thursday night’s programming (which included the season finales of Scrubs and 30 Rock), they chose to show their weatherman giving us viewers “second by second” updates on the storms… which, by the way, were in the extreme northeastern corner of WCNC’s viewing area. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky in Belmont during all this, and in fact the weather for most of the Charlotte area was just fine… a light rain in some parts, but mostly cloudy skies in the rest of the area.
But no. Instead of my favorite comedies, I get some jerkass weatherman breathlessly wanking about the storm for two freakin’ hours! In case the program directors at WCNC hadn’t noticed… it’s 2008, folks. WCNC broadcasts SD programming on channel 36 (cable channel 6), HDTV programming on channel 36.1 (cable channel 220) and… 24 hour weather information on channel 36.2 (cable channel 221). They could have chosen to run their normal programming and simply added a crawler that said “for storm news, please tune to channel 36.2” on the screen… but they didn’t. Since many folks don’t have digital TVs yet, they could have even flip-flopped their programming, and run weather information on their SD\HD channels and their normal programming on 36.2 for the 97% of us that were unaffected by the storm.
And to add insult to injury, they did run a crawler that said that “… My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, The Office and 30 Rock will be broadcast tomorrow on NBC.COM…”. Why yes, that’s a perfectly acceptable substitute: a 320×240 streaming Internet video looks exactly as good as the 1080i version WCNC would have broadcast!
Bastards!
WCNC “NewsChannel36” is now broadcasting in High Def