Comcast: Temporary equipment failure prevented Hawks fans from watching game in HD
BY FRANCINE KNOWLES Staff Reporter fknowles@suntimes.com June 16, 2013 1:28PM
Chelios Pub and Grill in Aurora is packed with Chicago Blackhawk fans watching multiple TV screens on Wednesday, June 12, 2013. | Jon Cunningham~For Sun-Times Media
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Updated: July 18, 2013 6:37AM
Equipment failure was blamed for temporarily knocking out the signal to the Chicago Blackhawks-Boston Bruins Stanley Cup finals game Saturday night, preventing Comcast viewers from watching the game in high definition.
Comcast’s Customer Care center lit up with calls from frantic fans, but the cable company declined Sunday to say how many customers called to complain.
For 25 minutes, customers throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, who had been viewing the game on the NBC Sports channel, had no access to the game in HD.
“A piece of equipment that receives HD signals from broadcasters and transmits them to customers went down for a short period of time,” Comcast spokeswoman Angelynne Amores, said in an email response to questions.
“Fortunately, we became aware of the issue and were able to reestablish the broadcast quickly.
“As one would expect, calls did spike for a short period of time, but then quickly returned to normal levels when the high-definition broadcast was restored,” she said.
Comcast won’t say whether customers have demanded refunds.
“We don’t provide information about the nature of calls to our Customer Care centers, but our sense is that customers were most concerned about restoration of the broadcast,” Amores stated. “. . . We understand that many people did tune to the channel in SD [standard definition] format and were able to continue to watch the game.”
The standard definition feed was not affected.
