Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025) (opens in new tab)

I completely agree.

But as a person in charge of keeping a brand new (volunteer) FM station running smoothly, this is horrifying. I feel every technical problem physically in my body.

It's not them, it's me.

Yes exactly. And this is an incredibly short list. Great engineering over there.

Preach.

And now compare to modern endless stream of junk that flows into oblivion.

As a kid i remember being fascinated by technical difficulties screens, EAS tests, etc. Generally anything that unwittingly revealed the technical aspects of running a broadcast station. This was before we really knew how to use the internet even, so for many years, I'd wonder what a screen saying "No Access Card" or "Coriogen Eclipse" meant. When we learned about Google, it was suddenly a very educational experience to google these things and learn what was going on behind the scenes. I'm a software engineer today, but surely the nearest parallel universe version of me grew up to be a broadcast engineer.

I think I get it too. There's a strange, hard-to-describe feeling there for me. It's like a "comfy, but darkly eerie" feeling whenever something like a broadcast technical difficulty or "Max Headroom"-esque event happens.

Like, I'm sitting comfy watching TV, and there's some technical glitch that pulls back the curtain a little bit. It's interesting and not as irritating as a bug in say a website, because I'm still intrinsically doing the activity I was previously (watching television), I'm just now inexplicably watching a different broadcast.

Who knows, it might be the dreamlike quality Cartoon Network/Toonami/Adult Swim had in the late 90s/early 2000s as well. The technical glitches fit thematically with the low-fi beats.

My favorite niche catalog is this list of chairs of star trek: https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/chairs-trek.htm

Knowing cable companies that was probably until all contracts with that channel as part of the subscription ended. They had to keep the channel running otherwise they might need to refund people.

I suppose it makes sense if your channel doesn't have a lot of new or live programming to just send a tape instead of setting up a feed.

I always wondered about these types of channels back then, that had absolutely no original programming, and very few if any commercials. What was the plan with them? Were they just trying to keep brand familiarity? Was it so difficult to get a channel spot that they didn't want to lose it? But if so, why go through all the hassle to get the spot with no income stream?

This is the rare opportunity I get to flex my broadcast experience. Generally these are setup in a chain:

    Playlists -> Playback -> Character Generator (draws the bugs, coming up next, and other graphics overtop), -> (other stuff) -> Network feed

> July 16, 2023: About 17 minutes into the 1:00pm airing of the Teen Titans Go! episode "And the Award for Sound Design Goes to Rob / Some of Their Parts", the feed blacked out for six seconds, then the screenbug disappeared for the rest of the episode. The screenbug returned during the 1:30pm airing of the episode "Cat's Fancy".

This sounds to me like the character generator failing and the playback being taken directly to air.

TIL that a dog is a bug

Broadcast errors are not only interesting to watch, they also made TV feel human and alive. Nowadays, watching most cable channels feels like staring at the output of a VLC playlist with ten movies on loop.

And why?

Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)

In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in the same way I admire this web page.

I am guessing someone who works at the station shared some internal documents.

I remember in the mid 90s watching Nickelodeon before school and they played an entire 30m block of commercials instead of a program. They probably lost the tape or something.