BDN promised live coverage of President Donald Trump’s address to the nation Thursday night and did not deliver it. The stream began freezing within moments of going live, and after several minutes of broken video and one failed restart, I ended the broadcast.
The picture froze more than 160 times in the first five minutes, and nearly half of what viewers saw was a frozen frame. A presidential address deserves better, and continuing would have been worse than stopping.
The failure traces to a single configuration error. The broadcast software was set to encode video on the computer’s main processor rather than on hardware built for that job, and under the load of a live production the processor could not keep up. A full rehearsal of the setup would have exposed the error before air. I did not run one, and that responsibility is mine.
A live blog accompanied the stream, as BDN’s live coverage typically does for readers who cannot watch. Because the broadcast failed before substantive coverage reached it, I took the live blog down as well.
Two corrections are already in place. The encoding configuration was fixed the same night, and BDN will not carry another major live event without a complete rehearsal of the exact production, from startup through the fallback plan.
BDN’s commitment is unchanged. This network carries every presidential address live, and the next one will be delivered properly. Thank you for your patience and your support.
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