noelyf
VIP Member
England captain Steven Gerrard celebrates scoring his team's first goal against USA in Rustenburg.
ITV yesterday apologised for a clanger almost as big as England goalkeeper Robert Green's after 1.5 million fans watching the World Cup clash with the USA on the broadcaster's HD channel missed Steven Gerrard's fourth minute goal because of a "transmission error".
The company apologised "unreservedly" for the "unacceptable interruption" to the game when human error led to high-definition viewers missing about 20 vital seconds of football.
They instead had to watch an ad for Hyundai cars, one of the station's two multimillion sponsors for its coverage of the tournament.
ITV immediately switched HD coverage to standard definition already being watched on ITV1 to avoid any other possible disruption to the broadcast.
The audience peaked near the game's end at 9.15pm, attracting 20.1 million viewers, 73% of the total TV audience, on its two channels.
As an investigation got under way, ITV blamed Technicolor, its transmission supplier.
When the blunder happened, an estimated 15 million viewers were watching the match in standard definition and were unaware that 1.5 million others were missing out. At half-time, presenter Adrian Chiles gave only the mildest hint of the calamity, when he said: "Apologies for those watching in HD, I believe there was some interruption in your coverage."
Fans' fury was vented through forums on ITV.com. Poster banadvertsonitv said: "ITV show once again what a bunch of amateurs they really are," while quidditys_shore complained: "The one thing you don't want to mess up and ITV do it big time." Sambafootball advised: "Hand over your games to BBC ," and argylejanner said: "Good luck Adrian Chiles, you've sold your soul to the muppet show."
Tomdon007 fumed: "Heads should roll. The biggest opportunity ever to gain kudos as a broadcaster and they muck it up big time (clean language version)". Mad Maxine reported: "Thought we'd accidentally sat on the TV controller until we realised it was ITV that had done it."
A statement from ITV said: "An error by ITV's transmission providers, Technicolor, meant that ITV1 HD's coverage of the England v USA match was interrupted for approximately 20 seconds. ITV1's standard definition coverage was unaffected.
ITV immediately investigated this issue and a preliminary report has indicated that the cause of the problem was human error at Technicolor, in London.
Richard Cross, Group Technology Director, ITV plc said: "We apologise unreservedly to viewers for the unacceptable interruption to high definition coverage of the match.
"We met with Technicolor first thing this morning to put in place measures to address the issue and to ensure that Technicolor takes the appropriate action with immediate effect."
A spokesman said: "We are in dialogue with Hyundai and we have apologised."
The broadcaster would know how many complaints there had been by Monday.
ITV had about 1,000 complaints when a similar mistake – going to an advert – meant viewers missed Evertons winning goal at the end of extra time in a fourth round FA cup replay against Liverpool in February 2009, a glitch ITV called at the time "unprecedented".
There were also repeated complaints about the broadcaster's coverage of Formula 1 – now back with the BBC – because of ad breaks which viewers felt led to them missing important parts of the races.
In May this year, a "technical problem" led to some viewers missing the last six seconds of Nikes 3 minute World Cup Advert.
The National Grid reported an electricity surge at half time of 1,140 megawatts, the equivalent of the power consumption of a city the size of Newcastle. At full-time, there was a 1,100MW surge, equivalent to 440,000 kettles being turned on.
