Dirty Red Commie

I tried to do some digging about MythTV to see if there was some sort of easter-egg-ish type thing about it and couldn't find any mention of it. That doesn't mean it's not there but it might be. However, since it went away during local ads I doubt it was on the MythTV side of things.

A coworker mentioned to us that his friend also saw it but that's the only other person besides Ben that saw it. Ben said that someone on another site mentioned that it was a Montana thing but that was as much info as anyone had.

I think the main difficulty here is that he was looking at the HD over-the-air signal that almost no one in Montana uses yet. I think we usually only get 3-5 stations over the air if we're LUCKY!

My idea is that it may have been some sort of covert emergency broadcast system test. Maybe they were testing their ability to overlay an image on the signal given to them at a specific point. Then, on the more local level, the local ads just replace whatever signal is coming in so the local ads didn't have it.

I don't know... very interesting. Maybe some more googling tonight will turn up more than it did last night.

~Spicy

Okay, there's lots of comments about it at engadget. Here's some of the one's that actually help in order they were posted over there.

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Chad @ Aug 18th 2008 8:16AM
Nope, didn't happen here.
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Christopher @ Aug 18th 2008 12:42AM
Didnt see it. I have DirecTV and went to the race in question... Didnt see anything remotely looking like the guys from MST 3000. Maybe it was local??? Anyone else??
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Taylor @ Aug 18th 2008 1:15AM
Watching via DirecTV in Dallas. Didn't see it.
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Josh @ Aug 18th 2008 2:13AM
It didn't happen in Denver.
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xdrive @ Aug 18th 2008 2:26AM
It didn't happen on Time Warner Cable HD in Milwaukee. Everything looked normal here at that exact time in the race and I have a picture to prove it.
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Emi Briet @ Aug 18th 2008 2:30AM
Ok...scratch that theory. Next theory: someone at the local affiliate put it up. Probably added it to the network feed's output stream before it got to the board. That would also produce the effects described, since local ads would come from a different output stream into the board.
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rock99rock @ Aug 18th 2008 2:37AM
your second theory is feasible with an upstream Chyron.
If this really happened while i was watching the Olympics, I probably would have shit myself laughing.
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Fenrir @ Aug 18th 2008 3:38AM
Yeah, it was on the HD feed in Montana, and they were on the wrong side of the screen.
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woot! one other saw it.
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ryaninc @ Aug 18th 2008 12:38PM
Also watching from Florida, over-the-air HD and didn't see it. Wish it'd been real. :-)
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RomanPilot @ Aug 18th 2008 2:15PM
It came on several times during Sunday on the digital feed here in Helena, MT. Wasn't there on the analog station. Girlfriend had no idea what it was and she was getting annoyed.
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Woot! that's 2!

So basically, Ben, you aren't crazy, and you can take off the tinfoil hat.

It also seems like it was localized to MT because that's two people in MT that say they saw it and lots, including Denver that didn't.

Also, I found a link to a video that was taken down at dynebolik.wordpress.com I'm not sure if that was one of Ben's tries but the title is "Mystery Science Theater on Beijing Olympics Broadcast (NBC)?"

It looks like NBC is really cracking down on any videos of the olympics. BOOOOO!

~Spicy

Someone else saw it, took photos and put them on flickr

flickr photo 1
flickr photo 2

Some comments on reddit pose that maybe it was someone's last day at work. The idea of viral marketing came up too but it'd be weird to do that just in MT... who knows.

Heh.... someone over at mst3kinfo picked up on it. Here's one comment
if it isn’t ‘real’, it’s cute and well-done.
if it is real, does this usher in an era of ‘MST-Rolling’?

I got a kick out of that.

Another person opines,
Agreed, this is a lame attempt at grabbing the ‘pointless hoax of the month” trophy.

Meh. I believe you Ben. Probably because I know you and talk to you face to face though.

As far as I can piece together from comments it happened only in (at least parts of) Montana on the HD over-the-air signal. It might be that they're still in the testing phase of it and didn't expect anyone to see it. If that's true then they were probably just testing their overlay feature.

One of us really should call the local station and see what they say.

~Spicy

UPDATE****** THE ENTIRE ENGINEERING STAFF OF THE TV STAION IN QUESTION HAS BEEN FIRED BECAUSE SOME ASSHOLE POSTED ALL THIS SHIT ABOUT US AND THE TV STATION.........HOPE EVERYONE IS FUCKING HAPPY!!!!!!!

I sincerely hope that's not true. Certainly, nobody ever asked us to take it down.

But if it is true, I'd argue that they were fired because of their own actions, not ours. We didn't change the broadcast. I posted this out of awe and curiosity. I had no way of knowing what was going on.

This is probably already old news, but the story is in today's Helena IR.

Anonymous Capitalist: If one was to value their job, they wouldn't inform the public (yes, that is the internet) that they were playing solitaire during said events. Your employer could have fired up the Googler & found this information out themselves.

Good day.

The Billings Gazette ran the same article in its Sunday paper.

~Spicy

I know that this thing is kind of old news by now but in response to anonymous up there, I have confirmation that no one was fired. In an email from a source referencing the tech on duty that weekend, "He is still working [here]."

This is Montana. Techs are pretty hard to come by in any field. It's pretty hard to replace a single tech. It'd be impossible to replace "THE ENTIRE ENGINEERING STAFF OF THE TV STAION [sic]," in a timely manner.

~Spicy