After a first half riddled with technical difficulties, FOX had a better finish in the second half, fixing the issues leading them to cut away prematurely from the first half of action in the Bears-Vikings game.
“It could be a number of issues,” said Dan Bell, FOX Sports Vice President of Communications. “There are transmission lines that receive the signal to broadcast the game. We started experiencing reception from the signal to the transmission lines into the TV production truck at Soldier Field. It resulted in us losing the picture and obviously audio in the second quarter.”
The dropped feed affected 10 percent of the country, according to Bell, who also mentioned the FOX crew in Chicago and Los Angeles worked as “hard and fast as they can” to “reboot the entire process.”
“We certainly understand the viewers’ frustration in Chicago,” Bell added. “We apologize. We did our best to get the signal back as fast as we could. We’ve been doing this for 20 years on NFL on FOX. We pride ourselves to avoid situations like these, but in this circumstance this was something that was beyond our control.”
Because of the technical issues, which FOX had been apologizing for during the broadcast, viewers were forced to listen to just the audio feed near the end of the first half and witnessed a premature cut to the FOX halftime show back in studio.
“That game in Chicago having some technical difficulties, FOX NFL analyst Curt Menefee said. “We’ll get you right back out there as soon as we can.”
With no video at some points, plus many technical difficulties, fans voiced their opinions before halftime.
[View the story “FOX technical issues upset Bears-Vikings’ viewers” on Storify]
