F1 results. What twat tweeted them?
Don’t get me wrong, I love communications. It really tickles me that I can have my Google Calender ‘talking’ to my Outlook which in turns ‘talks’ to my Blackberry all without me doing anything. And two years ago I was blown away that I could talk to family back home in Australia via mobile phone from the top of a mountain in Switzerland.
Twenty five or so years ago a close friend lamented that it was weird that we couldn’t have some sort of mobile ‘tricorder’ like device and chat to others without wires from and to almost anywhere in the world. If we had known then what we know now! (Well I’d be a millionaire to start with!)
But there are some downsides to this ‘communications everywhere’ as I discovered last night.
I am in Sydney for a lightning visit to get a short, sharp training session on the new Panasonic 3D camcorder. This means that everything happens two hours ‘earlier’ than home so to speak. So at 10:30pm last night, it was ‘body time’ only 8:30pm. (There is an early morning trap in this too but that’s for another time). As such, I was till wide awake to watch the Belgian GP from Spa, where Mark Webber had grabbed pole.
Normally Grand Prix’ last for around 90 minutes or so, so imagine my bloody annoyance at around 11:30 when the ABC tweets that Hamilton had won and Webber was second and the race finished in heavy rain. On TV, there was still another 20 minutes to run. Bear in mind in Perth of course this would have been 9:30pm and the telecast hadn’t even started!
Yes I know I could have had Twitter turned off, but that defeats the purpose of why I have a Blackberry; why don’t the networks just agree that they won’t broadcast any sporting results until all telecasts/ radio broadcasts have finished? The F1 is live via 1HD, so they managed to not do anything until about 2 hours after it had actually finished so surely another 30 minutes wouldn’t have hurt? Or 2:30 catering for WA (for a change).
And yes I know that if the ABC hadn’t tweeted it, someone else would possibly have done so. I am happy to take that risk, but to me, a news service doing it is akin to Ch 9 spoiling Ch 7’s thunder say, by having the results of a delayed telecast as a newsflash. Let common sense and fairness prevail, and think of the viewers for a change I say.
