WVAH technical snafu

[David Paleg]

For the past two hours or so, Fox-11 WVAH has had a freeze frame on Doris Roberts of Everybody Loves Raymond. I am watching it on Suddenfink cable in Charleston. Don't know if the problem is over the air or just on cable. I tried calling the WCHS number in the phonebook since WVAH is not listed, and got the automated run-around. Doesn't anyone ever monitor the signal? Will the station try to still bill the sponsors whose spots did not air?

[Big Media]

Given the time, the TX may have gone off the air for maintenance. Most demods used by the cable systems will freeze the last frame of video when it loses packets. Gone are the days of the snow and white noise.

[Hoss]

Will the station try to still bill the sponsors whose spots did not air?
Went into the sales office and the sales secretary said she was swamped with invoice changes. Asked her why and she said the coding was all wrong for one of our major clients. Got my interest and when I looked she was changing the spot coding. Seems the change order for that month’s rotation was not entered so the previous month’s spot continued to run. I told her that was called fraudulent billing but she said the sales manager said it was just correcting a mistake. This was in the mid 80’s but I doubt anything has changed!

[Big Media]

Yep.. She and the sales manager would have been fired. I remember a couple of big wigs at Adventure Radio Group (circa 1995) getting shit caned for this practice including the GM and the Business Manager. In that particular case, it was ABC Radio Network they were fraudulently billing.