Hurricane IRENE - East Coast Impact Coverage

You won't see this on Sky but Fox are doing this during national ads, locally inserted ads are fullscreen (the stream I'm watching appears to be coming from Bright House cable in Tampa, Florida.

http://www.btinternet.com/~leestanley625/junk/fox-irene.JPG

They were promoting a 2 hour Geraldo at Large special last night, and I presume they dropped their usual opinion-based programming and were live through the night, as they are now. Fox and Friends is starting an hour early this morning (5am ET).

We are actually seeing that on Sky at the moment - looks like they've either dropped the UK adverts to show this information to everyone, or it's just a mistake and someone forgot to hit the button to opt the UK out.

I assume it's actually automated, with different signals for different types of breaks, but they are playing the ads out from the gallery to play the graphics therefore that signal isn't going out.

There seem to be two types of ad break we see in the UK. One we get our own ads and then the (outdated) breakfiller, the other we get Fox Extra.

One will be the filler put out on the Fox news International feed and the UK ads will be what's inserted at Sky. It's the same as happens with the equivalent Sky News international service and BBC World. If the local market doesn;t have any ads you get the break filler

CNNs screen is too cluttered - at times there's just too much information on screen all in different styles and fonts and some of it too small to be legible (at least on SD) - the permanent looped map is next to useless.

US news graphic design can be awful at times, mind you I've seen worse:
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/files/original/FBNBO.jpg

I think I've sussed it. We get Fox Extra when Fox only plays out national ads, for example up to the TOTH, and on other breaks where there are local ads in the States, Sky insert their own ads, and the breakfiller is there to fall back on for both.

If we are getting national ads on Sky, as James suggests above, are we not getting any Fox Extra segments?

CNBC is doing Special Report programming today.

CNN have their 'star' anchors out this morning. John King, Anderson Cooper are out and about in New York. Suzanne Malveaux is in the studio for an early edition of 'Sunday'.

CNBC dipped into the Weather Channel for a bit as they did with WNBC earlier.

edit: as of 11:54 they are showing MSNBC.

I wish they wouldn't dip into and out of other channels at random like this, would rather they just stuck MSNBC on if they can't do their own thing, they are basically channel hopping across the other NBC/Universal outlets.

That's a 4:3 picture being stretched.

CNNi are letterboxing CNN-US which is why you're getting black bands at the top and bottom.

Graphics from hell

And as Hurricane Irene pounds New York, the Fox News website runs an opinion piece:
Do We Really Need A National Weather Service?

The stupid, it hurts!