CBS 4 Denver/Bresnan weirdness

UPDATE: Wow! 4:29 AM and the still image below is still being broadcast. Somebody screwed up royally here; 7 hours + of lost advertising and lost viewership. Yikes. Hopefully this will be discovered and repaired by tomorrow sometime.

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Today, Saturday September 20 2008, there was some weirdness happening on my Bresnan Communications cable service. For at least a couple hours in the evening, channel 4 (CBS 4 out of Denver) was broadcasting just this single paused image:


This occurred at the very least from 9 PM until 10:40 PM. I noticed it because I had set my DVR to record "48 Hours", and this paused image is all that showed up for the entire hour. I have no idea what this image is actually from, other than it's probably not from "48 hours"; perhaps it's from one of the shows from the previous two hours: "NCIS" or "The Unit", but I don't watch either show and thus don't know them well enough to guess.

Now, the question is: who's responsible for this paused image to appear? It's got to be one of three entities: (1) the CBS network; (2) CBS 4 Denver; (3) the local cable provider, Bresnan Communications. I discount that this is a network problem because CBS was broadcasting just fine on another CBS cable channel. So between (2) and (3), I think the likely problem is happening at the cable provider, where someone pressed a "pause" key accidentally, or some piece of software has broken causing this still image to broadcast continuously over their cable channel 4. I suspect Bresnan instead of CBS 4, just because it's my guess that there is someone at CBS 4 always monitoring what they are actually broadcasting. After all, that single broadcast channel is most of their business. However, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine this slipping through unnoticed at Bresnan, where most of the operation is automated and very few folks would likely be constantly monitoring their 100 or 200 channels. Plus, I think I noticed a similar problem on another cable-only channel tonight too.

I thought this might be a glitch in my 7-year-old ReplayTV DVR. Such glitches happen occasionally, where the audio stops being recorded, or some other strange problem. But I rebooted the DVR and the problem didn't go away. So I bypassed the DVR and went to direct cable viewing on the TV and sure enough, there was this still image!

Anyway, the lesson here I think is just that even with all of todays cool technology and automated systems, it's still possible to have a glitch like this happen. I'd be curious to find out if anyone else has seen something like this happen.