I have altered history through the power of email!
In late April, I complained to my faceless anonymous cable company complaint email service about the blacking-out of the last half of a local Yankees broadcast. I do not love the Yankees but their local broadcast is pretty good coverage and I do need my Kate Smith “God Bless America” seventh inning fix now and then. So I wrote as follows:
I noticed you made an error in switching to a Canadian broadcast of one US channel on Friday night. At 9 pm on Friday, Channel 5 (Syracuse) switched to the CTV Ottawa broadcast of “Third Watch”. Third Watch is not shown on Friday nights on channel five – the Yankees game is. As a result, we lost the last third of the game and had the same “Third Watch” show on channels 5 and 6. You are only required under CRTC regulation to switch when the broadcast of the US station is also on a Canadian so this swtich was not proper.
Gee – I hope Al saw me do that…
I received this in response:
Thank you for taking the time to contact Cogeco Technical Support.
As we do try to have a system that does not fault, some issues do occur such as some switching issues. Although I do not know the extent of as to why the switch did occur we do also try to resolve such problems in a timely manor. If you have any other questions or concerns please visit the Contact Us section at www.cogeco.ca. If you would like to speak to a customer service representative please call 1-800-267-9000. Our representatives are available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
“Try” was not giving me the happy and I was a little concerned that this was actually a canned autobot response so tried again:
Will this practice be stopped? Channel 5 in Kingston will carry
baseball on Friday nights and will not have the same TV show as on channel 6 through out the season.
To which this respose was given:
Hopefully the programming that we receive from the stations was corrected and will not happen again.
“Hopefully” still left me wondering but I dropped it as it was apparently no bot. Frankly, as there is only a game on the odd Friday night, especially early in the baseball season, I had in my mind it was a switch requiring human attention and so the cause was lost. Happy, then, was the man that watched the 9:00 pm time slot come and go with no switch to the Canadian broadcast of a US show and happier still the man who saw the same pass into the 10:00 pm hour. Victory. The entire see-saw Yanks v. Cubs game with the local Yanks announcers and US car dealer ads. Yes, I know I have corrupted myself as a Canadian in spending my Friday night in this way but I could not help myself.