International Weather Coverage

All the TX stations are reporting at 10pm that 7 people were killed. 11 tornadoes touched-down in and around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Devasting. Birmingham, had a couple of Tornadoes go thru on Christmas night. No deaths but major damage.

US Blizzard - WSB Atlanta rolls out its 22 Box Team Coverage. (lol) By now its before famous for it ridculousness, WSB plays along and tweet it out when they start using it.

Such a shame that Don Lemon isn't back out in the CNN Blizzard Mobile - like he was last year.

At least this time all the reporters appear in daylight. When they did this in 2014 2014 one or two of the reporters hits were dark outside while everyone else was daylight. It's worth noting that the graphic was created by their creative services team and wasn't live. The crews sent out a recorded stare so it would appear that they are live.

Can't imagine many studios being able to simultaneously take 22 outside sources!

Definitely not. They only have thirteen ENG trucks and four LiVeU units and the rest of the reports came from cellular or other mobile systems. It wasn't mentioned in the article I posted before but WSB had all their trucks set up and ready to go when they go live. All they had to do was turn on the transmitter and the station will get the picture. When the shot was done they turned off the transmitter to allow their other trucks to go live.

Likely the only places where they could ingest 22 sources would be the networks which probably can handle many more.

Since they are the COX flagship station, they obviously get the most resources and when you watch WSB's Channel2 Action News you can certainly see the professionalism and resources the station has to cover all of Greater Atlanta and North Georgia. Its an impressive station with a great heritage. You can certainly see why they are #1 in Atlanta.

And more importantly, I can't imagine many situations where you'd want to...

(Sport Relief have done something similar, in the past, live, during Sport Relief Mile programmes but they used an upstream multi-viewer with some clever DVE-ery, rather than doing every box via a DME/DVE/Re-sizers on the mixer)

This is where US stations go totally OTT and become a bit of a laughing stock overseas.

It is - the most I've seen on screen at one time in my market was a six box.

WSB has always been over the top - there're one of the strongest local stations in the country and DOMINATE the ratings news wise. WSB once ran a promo that was in very poor taste where they bragged that when a gunman walked into a school and forced the secretary to call a tv station for demands. Now it should be noted that the link came from a competitors blog but it included the promo copy. They are essentially a stations whose motto is "if it bleeds it leads" and they cover crime and court cases more so than their competitors because of their staff size. I remember seeing a Twitter picture that one of their anchors published showing that most reporters report two stories during the evening newscasts. I think this anchor does his show and then goes out into the field for his story.

The only time there's a bump or they loose the time slot is likely during the Olympics where NBC provides a strong lead in to their newscasts even if it is tape delayed.

Also there is this one neat piece of hardware from Orad called TD Control which is essentially a DVE engine. You can input up to 16 HD-SDI inputs and the box can put all of the sources on screen at once. It then sends out a HD-SDI port to the switcher for air. You can even make it to match your graphics.

But you always return to the question - why?

First (well important if not the actual first) rule of quality television. 'Just because you can, doesn't mean you should'

I think their reasoning was just what you said and the fact of they want to brag about their team.

In all honesty snow coverage reports from the field are all the same with the reporter adlibbing or talking to people out and about with a token few located at the local emergency management centers.

Stations also go crazy offering day long coverage because they receive a lot more revenue than they would if they stuck with network programming which have fewer ad spots.

Live coverage from WLS in Chicago of extremely high winds that are toppling trees, causing windows to fall off skyscrapers (several downtown buildings have been evacuated), and closing down city streets:

http://abc7chicago.com/live/