[LEAPSECS] Celebrating the new year a few seconds late

[Magnus Danielson]

Hi,

On 1/1/19 3:15 PM, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> A lot of Americans synchronize their new year celebrations to the 
> drop of the ball in Times Square as seen on TV, which means they 
> celebrate a few seconds late because digital TV has an inherent delay 
> to it (for signal encoding or something... I really don't know the 
> technical details). Networks sometimes add a few more seconds to live 
> broadcasts to give them a chance to bleep out obscenities; I'm not 
> sure whether they do that with New Years Eve shows.
> 
> The same goes for broadcasts of Big Ben ringing in the UK, or 
> anything other countries may use.
> 
> As long as people put up with stuff like that, it's unlikely the 
> people on this list will ever make headway against the popular notion 
> that one more second plus or minus (as regards the presence or 
> absence of a leap second) is no big deal.
> 

Well, a typical network would allow for about 7 seconds.
On top of that, US television also needs another 10 s to allow for time
to react to "wardrobe malfunction" of people like Ms. Jackson to be handled.

Cheers,
Magnus