[LEAPSECS] New Year in Times Square

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 1 Jan 2011 at 10:37, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> In message <4D1EB623.2720.372137B4 at dan.tobias.name>, "Daniel R. Tobias" writes:

> 

> >I just watched the ball drop in Times Square (on TV, not in person!), 

> >and noticed that my watch (auto-synced daily via radio signal) was 

> >about 15 seconds fast [...]

> 

> In difference from analog tv/radio, digital transmission of broadcast

> signals almost begs to be delayed.


As I recall, a few years ago (before the U.S. digital TV transition 
was completed and the analog broadcasts stopped), when I had the same 
program turned on with both a digital high-definition TV and an 
analog one, the digital one was delayed a few seconds from the analog 
one (because, I guess, my cable company was getting the analog feed 
directly with no delay [beyond whatever delay was imposed by the 
network for bleeping out bad words] while the digital one had delays 
for encoding/decoding).  However, at some point in the intervening 
years, things flipped over so that now it's the analog TV that has a 
few seconds delay from the digital one, I guess because the cable 
company has to create the analog versions of the channels themselves 
(now that it's no longer broadcast that way) by decoding the digital 
transmission and that takes longer than simply sending the digital 
signal directly.  Either way, it's a bit of a nuisance when I have 
TVs on in several rooms, some of them ancient analog ones while the 
main TV in the living room is digital/HD.

Anyway, if there's one time that the average person (not the 
specialized techies on this list) actually notices and cares about 
time down to the second, it's New Years Eve, but it seems that the 
time they see when they count down to the TV is actually shifted 
somewhat from the real time.

The network techies, however, do need to concern themselves with 
being precisely synced to whatever time standard the Times Square 
people use; it would be embarrassing if the ball dropped a second 
early or late compared to their countdown.  This means that if there 
was a leap second at UTC midnight (a few hours before New York 
midnight), they'd better all be on the same page with regard to 
applying it (or not).


-- 
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