The general manager at KCTV Channel 5 wanted to blame CBS for the station's inability to recover the lost signal from the Kansas-Missouri basketball game on Saturday. "The network simply made a mistake," G.M. Bobby Totsch said in a message posted on the station's website.
Totsch's story is undercut by the fact that engineers at other CBS affiliates in Jayhawk/Tiger territory turned the right knobs and found the game's conclusion. WHB 810 host Kevin Kietzman talked with an engineer at WIBW-TV in Topeka who suggested that KCTV5's incompetence kept it from reconnecting with the feed before it was too late.
Sunspots have been blamed for the interruption of the feed, which occurred with Kansas leading Missouri late in the second half. KCTV5's tractor beam failed to reorient, and Totsch put the blame squarely on the network, telling The Kansas City Star that KCTV5 received bad instructions on what to do if solar activity interfered with the broadcast. "CBS screwed up," he said. "This started and ended with the network."
Or did it? Kietzman's interview with Cary Lahnum, the director of engineering at WIBW, indicates that KCTV5 suffered from both a lack of equipment and know-how.
Lahnum speculated that KCTV5 "could have limited monitoring capabilities." WIBW purchased an additional HD receiver in an apparent attempt to cope with sunspots and other viewer-frustrating phenomena. "This kind of thing doesn't happen all the time, but it's happened to us multiple times before."
While insisting that the network was 100 percent at fault, Totsch seemed to acknowledge that KCTV5's engineering room is not as advanced as it could be. He told the Star that the station plans to install an additional $8,000 receiver.
Lahnum went on to suggest that a skilled technician could have found the signal even without the extra gear. KCTV5, it turns out, was receiving the "flex" feed of the game, which is distributed to stations where the viewers won't mind missing the last three minutes of a game in which a Big 12 school has a comfortable (but not insurmountable) lead. KCTV5, Lahnum said, "most likely just never looked back for the original feed."
After speaking with Lahnum, Kietzman spoke with Totsch, who finally seemed ready to put on a pair of big-boy pants.
I don't want to blame CBS anymore. We needed to react better. If we could have rebooted our receiver in a more timely fashion, yes, we would have had the end of the game.
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