Election Night Results

After voting yesterday I couldn’t wait to get home last night to watch the election results.  I got home and flipped on the television.  On DirecTV channel 102 their election mix channel was running however none of the broadcast networks were broadcasting yet, on the bottom of the screen was a message that DirecTV’s election coverage was going to being at 7pm ET.  I checked out Dish Networks offering and their 6 channel election mosaic was already up and in action.

At 7PM DirecTV’s coverage kicked in and it was great having all four broadcast networks available in the mosaic plus CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and BBC America.  What was even better was it was in high definition.

I thought DirecTV’s mosaic offering was just that, a standard multi picture mosaic where you could choose the audio from the channel you wanted to hear, and if you wanted to see it full screen you could just click it to be taken to the full size version of that channel.  Boy was I wrong.

Yes it was a mosaic, but it was one of the most well planned / designed mosaic I have ever seen.  As I mentioned they carried the big 4 broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX & NBC) but what made DirecTV’s mosaic outstanding was that at times the networks would cut away for local elections coverage,  when this happened DirecTV put up a notice that Local Election Coverage was available and by clicking on that network, it took you to the affiliate for that network in your area!  So if you clicked on the NBC box it changed the channel to your local NBC station.  On top of that if you were watching the HD feed of the Election Mix channel, when you clicked on any of the channels it took you to the full HD version of that channel (well except for BBC America and MSNBC which do not broadcast in HD.)

In addition they had a ticker on the bottom on the screen which gave interesting information about the election results, plus a delegate’s scoreboard for the presidential campaign.

The DirecTV Election Mix channels were well planned out and executed and unfortunately for Dish Network their Election Mosaic channel was just that a mosaic channel.  At one time Dish Network’s OpenTV based applications were state of the art and were considered groundbreaking in the world of interactive television, but now it’s painful to use as it takes 5 – 10 seconds for the interactive channel to load up and the standard 6 channel mosaic is tired.  You could pull up an election application, but that took time to load and you lost the mosaic while you were in the election application.  I am hoping that the next generation of Dish Network receivers offer more advanced interactive functions and don’t take forever to load.

For this election, I give the win to DirecTV for its groundbreaking election coverage.

The cable and broadcast networks went all out this year with some really neat new technology to cover this year’s election.  The award for best use of technology goes to NBC News and CNN for this year’s election coverage.  NBC gets it for its amazing virtual studios where its talent was in a green screen room but on television it looked like this amazing room where all kinds of facts and figures flew from the floors and walls around the talent. And CNN also gets a nod from me as well, and not for Wolf Blitzer talking to a hologram of a reporter in the field but for its multi-touch screen which was a wealth of information and real time updates.  It was neat they could actually check how candidates were doing by county / city plus compare in real time the data against prior elections.  Others had some touch screen technology but nothing like CNN had.  As far as Wolf Blitzer talking to holograms goes, while it was neat I was asking myself what the point was.  I was tuned in to watch election results not an episode of Star Trek.   The entire thing seemed like over kill to me and the holograms reporting was no different than any in the field reporter.  The hologram added nothing to their reporting and to me was a waste of time and expense to CNN, but alas it’s not my money so who am I to complain.

Congrats to all of last nights winners!