" insure against every possible thing that could ever go wrong, they would have to build a second studio on a separate part of the city’s electric grid, with redundant copies of all the equipment and broadcast content, along with a full crew of understudies ready to take over at a moment’s notice."
WTH?? I guess this person has never heard of backup generators? Every broadcast TV station has them.
To begin with, airplanes do fall out of they sky, sometimes right on your backup generator. (speaking from military experience where yes, there is an entire backup studio waiting to take over, just in case. Or rather, the 'studio' is geographically dispersed, with 100% redundancy, which is another way of saying the same thing.)
But more importantly, *this* is what you noticed from that article?
No, but this was the point where the "let's make something up" got to be too much.
I'm not talking about low budget UHF channels, but TV stations I've been in and around all have multiple studios. If the switcher in Studio-A goes down, the signals can be routed to the control room for Studio-B. Also, Alex the know-it-all is such a forced thing that is just ridiculous and eye roll inducing. Anybody that is a jack of that many trades is a master of none of them. The entire forced analogy just got to be too much and I lost interest before a point was ever made.
That just covers electricity. They seem to be implying coverage of a multi-failure scenario.
Also, I don't think broadcast TV news is quite as reliable as the post makes it out to be.
Like this exchange happens all the time:
"and now we're going to our on site reporter, Onda Premises"
<45s silence>
"Oh, it appears we've lost them for now, we'll cycle back later. In our next story...."
Going to a remote is not the same thing as backup/redundancy within the studio. The broadcast was never interrupted. The latency between remotes can be mindnumbing, and with inexperienced reporter/anchor stepping over each other unable to sit through the delay it's pain inducing for the viewer. But that's an unrelated tangent