Indiana residents are fuming at Comcast for cutting off vital local weather information as tornado warnings were issued, replacing live forecasters with a static blue screen.
Comcast viewers were forced off local TV stations and locked out of their cable boxes, according to an investigation by WRTV in Indianapolis. Instead of getting live reports including storm tracks, Comcast viewers found a blue screen with a basic tornado warning scrolling across it. The message stayed on screen between 90 seconds to more than three minutes, and on one day alone Comcast locked viewers out of local storm reports 24 times during the tornado outbreak.
Comcast blamed the interruptions on its outdated infrastructure in the Indianapolis area.
The company said it is required to deliver the emergency alert messages, but critics complain Comcast can manage this without cutting off local stations’ live reporting.
“In many markets we have the technology in place to not override a particular broadcaster with a priority EAS alert,” a Comcast spokesperson told WRTV. “We are currently working on getting this capability on all platforms in every market.”
WRTV confirmed Indianapolis isn’t one of those markets and Comcast wasn’t talking when asked when the EAS improvements would reach Indianapolis.
Other providers didn’t experience any problems. Bright House delivers warnings without interrupting the picture on the underlying channel. AT&T said the same was true with U-verse.