Comcast Apologizes For Super Bowl Porn Glitch

DrinkDr.Pepper writes "Just after the last touchdown by the Cardinals, with 3 minutes to go in the game, approximately 30 seconds of pornographic material was shown, seen by an unknown number of Comcast customers in Tucson, Arizona who were watching the game in standard definition. Comcast has apologized (they used the word 'mortified') and is issuing a $10 credit to any customer who claims to have been impacted. Various news accounts suggest that the incident was a malicious act, but no one knows how it was done or by whom."

Comments

First penis

[Ethanol-fueled]

Tyler Durden strikes again!

Re:First penis

[martinw89]

While Ron Jeremy incidentally does have a penis, I believe Tyler Durden is the one inserting it everywhere.

Re:First penis

[BitterAndDrunk]

Anybody who's married. We're not inserting it anywhere. (without permission)

Re:First penis

[snspdaarf]

Well, not everywhere everywhere.

Re:First penis

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. Nobody here gets laid. Leave while you can!

Re:First penis

[Ares]

there are married people here?

:: ducks as his wife reads over his shoulder ::

Re:First penis

[Hatta]

Don't lie. You're still interested.

Re:First penis

[Miseph]

Well, I think the girl in the clip has some pretty compelling evidence she was "impacted".

Thanks comcast

[Dyinobal]

First time I'll have been paid to watch porn.

Re:Thanks comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is it, you pervert! NSFW! (obviously) http://comcastsuperbowlporn.com/cache/page2.html#video

Re:Thanks comcast

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Even more amusing is that somebody registered ComcastSuperBowlPorn.com just to display it.

Re:Thanks comcast

[WalksOnDirt]

Direct link. Otherwise I just get told I don't have the proper plug-in. Not very interesting porn, though.

Re:Thanks comcast

[Aazzkkimm]

In Tucson, AZ, porn pays YOU!

Janet Jackson Started a trend

[FredFredrickson]

You know your feature is boring when people watch it to see the funny ads, and in order to keep ratings up they flash tits at every turn.. Janet Jackson Started a trend..

What's so big about this football anyway?

Re:Janet Jackson Started a trend

[timeOday]

I would have agreed a few years ago, but the last two Superbowl matchups have been excellent, exciting games. For that matter I thought Springsteen did a great job with the halftime show, no gimmicks or voiceovers.

I think

[duckInferno]

the day that a news source posts a full uncensored clip of the incident is the day society has truly moved on from the arbitrary taboos of old.

Of course it'd also be the day that such an incident would merit only a footnote in an "odd stuff" newspaper section.

Re:I think

[Lord Ender]

Our brains are hard-wired for taboos because they helped primitive societies avoid disasters.

There is a lot of "noise" in the taboo "signal", for example: taboo words. But some taboos (against incest, or eating certain things) were socially useful. Even the common taboo against homosexual sex could have been beneficial to primitive societies because such practices were significantly more likely to spread disease through the population. Obviously, modern medicine makes this a non-issue, today.

I would say it is unrealistic to expect a society to have no useless taboos, because they are physically part of our brains. But if we stop using government to enforce useless taboos, we will have advanced.

Re:I think

[duckInferno]

The homosexual taboo is a relatively recent development. Many ancient cultures practiced it openly and it was often seen to be as perfectly normal as a relationship between a man and a woman.

Is there a difference?

[AKAImBatman]

With the Superbowl commercials being what they were this year, I'm surprised anyone noticed the difference. GoDaddy in particular is getting out of hand, though I was not impressed by the Doritos or NBC commercials either. (At least the Conan commercial was just amusing innuendo.) All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.

Re:Is there a difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, grow up, and pull the stick out of your ass already.

He can't. He's nailed to it.

Re:Is there a difference?

[drinkypoo]

All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.

You mean, more embarrassing than all the other years you watched a bunch of big sweaty guys in tights slapping each other on the ass for hours?

Re:Is there a difference?

[BobReturns]

To be fair to the grandparent, he did say "with the family.".
I wouldn't mind virtually any amount of explicit content in ads if I was on my own, but I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.

Re:Is there a difference?

[twistah]

Maybe you should tell your family this isn't the Victorian era anymore.

Re:Is there a difference?

[jaavaaguru]

Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?

Re:Is there a difference?

[Chris Burke]

Maybe you should tell your family this isn't the Victorian era anymore.

But they'd already spent so much on their wigs!

Re:Is there a difference?

[eigenstates]

Wait- we /aren't/ supposed to be running around... oh shit.

Re:Is there a difference?

[jmichaelg]

A family watching the Super Bowl has a reasonable expectation that they won't be subjected to someone else's idea of what acceptable sexual mores are these days. It was a football game, not a Victoria Secret premier.

Personally, I don't care about porn being available but I can sympathize with folks who were offended by Go Daddy's poor taste. I watched the game at a friend's house and ofter the Go Daddy Ad aired, they decided to switch registrars for their family domain away from Go Daddy.

Re:Is there a difference?

[drinkypoo]

Why? Is explicit content something dirty or shameful to be hidden away from the eyes of our poor defenseless children?

Yes, and I think we should KILL anyone who exposes children to graphic sexual imagery. After all, all children are products of violence, but not all children are products of sex. Er, wait...

(If you (the global you) were thinking of bringing up test tube babies as a counterexample, just kill yourself. kthxbye.)

Re:Is there a difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's NOT dirty/shameful, then you're not doing it right.

Re:Is there a difference?

[Bonker]

I wouldn't mind virtually any amount of explicit content in ads if I was on my own, but I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.

I submit that this is a cultural artifact.

You either see nothing offensive in ads with explicit content or feel that you can safely ignore it because you understand the difference between real life and the image of life that such advertisements would present. However, you'd be uncomfortable showing a child the same thing. Why is this?

I suspect there are a few reasons ranging the spectrum from cultural guilt, to superstition, and taboo abeyance.

Perhaps you'd feel responsible for educating the child on the differences between real life and the image of life that are presented by advertisers. In any other context, this is something we don't even think about. We know that simply eating breakfast cereal doesn't suddenly make you super-athletic and attractive. We don't have any difficulty repeating that to children, or explaining what's necessary to achieve those goals in the real world. But since our culture has placed such a strict taboo about imparting sex education to children, we feel incapable of telling the same kids that drinking beer and wine coolers doesn't make you attractive to half-naked dancers. We don't tell them that getting drunk in order to seek sexual gratification is a really risky, self-destructive behavior.

Arguably the latter is a much more important life lesson, but that same taboo forbids us from admitting that children have sexuality, let alone that they're even more vulnerable to being pandered to than adults.

Re:Is there a difference?

[HiThere]

Never lived on a farm, did you. Yet through most of history most families did. And also lived in single room huts.

Exposure to sex isn't harmful to children. I have no idea why some people think it is.

Re:Is there a difference?

[clone53421]

In Nevada you can have sex with a 14 year old if you're 35

huh?

Re:Is there a difference?

[AKAImBatman]

I'm amazed that among all these replies, no one has considered that my problem might not be so much the sex itself as much as the attitude toward sex? We're talking about commercials that objectify the people and devalue the act itself. Perhaps as a parent, I don't really want my kids to think of sex that way?

And besides. If we start allowing sex everywhere on television, that will soon be the ONLY thing on television. (It's getting pretty close these days.) There's always the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. As an intelligent species capable of reasoning and critical thinking, we should be making efforts to stimulate our intelligence rather than pandering to our baser instincts.

For those of you who need the cliff notes version (probably the ones who think these commercials are "ok"): I don't want my kids to grow up to be drooling apes.

Re:Is there a difference?

[nodrogluap]

Funny enough, the commercial must have worked, because guess where the guy bought the domain:

% whois ComcastSuperBowlPorn.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

      Domain Name: COMCASTSUPERBOWLPORN.COM
      Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
      Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
      Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com/
      Name Server: DNS66-1.NEXCESS.NET
      Name Server: DNS66-2.NEXCESS.NET
      Status: clientDeleteProhibited
      Status: clientRenewProhibited
      Status: clientTransferProhibited
      Status: clientUpdateProhibited
      Updated Date: 01-feb-2009
      Creation Date: 01-feb-2009
      Expiration Date: 01-feb-2010

>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:46:33 EST

Re:Is there a difference?

[Chris Burke]

You mean, more embarrassing than all the other years you watched a bunch of big sweaty guys in tights slapping each other on the ass for hours?

They aren't slapping ass for hours. There's incidental ass-slapping between bouts of football playing. Here's how it works:

If you're watching a show where it's in the majority football, with occasional ass-slapping, then you're watching the Super Bowl.

If you're watching a show where it's mostly ass-slapping with some football thrown in, then you're watching the DVD classing The Super Bowel.

Re:Is there a difference?

[electrons_are_brave]

There's a difference between sex and porn, though. Sure children shouldn't be taught that sex is somehow wrong or taboo. But the way sex is presented in a lot of porn pandering to male adolescent fantasies that have nothing to do with sex with a real live woman. I have nothing against porn, but children don't need to see women moaning with pleasure when nothing particularly pleasurable is happening to them - it wrong information that leads to urealistic expectations.

Re:Is there a difference?

[HiThere]

To an extent I agree with you. The problem is the tremendous range of things that get called porn...all the way down to a woman nursing her child.

Porn, apparently, is anything that bothers someone somewhere that has any connection however remote to sex.

I'd be much more in favor of saying that children shouldn't be exposed to violence. That wouldn't work either, but it would make as much sense.

FWIW, banning the road-runner cartoons for excessive violence is just stupid. STUPID!! Some people seem to think that censorship is the answer to everything. They ban cartoons, but don't stop wars. Which is more violent?

Re:Is there a difference?

[electrons_are_brave]

Agreed, and what I said wasn't meant to extend to some prudish, Victorian attitude about sex. And I have nothing against porn being made that shows women as playthings for men - any man who doesn't know the difference between how women act in the fantasy porno world and how real women respond sexually is ... well limited. But children don't know this - they see is what they see - they have no context to put it in. Besides that, I would have thought that the reason adults wouldn't want to see porn in front of children is simply beacuse it is pornographic - it's meant to arouse or at least titillate. Surely this introduces a certain awkwardness to the family lunch? Recognising that sex is essentially private act and not wanting it to be commodified to sell whatever isn't the same as prudishness.

Comcast missed the point.

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Comcast needn't have apologised for broadcasting porn. What did warrant an apology was showing porn containing nothing more than an ugly guy flapping his cock all over the place. You, sirs, have crossed the line!

What, no link ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, watch the clip in question here...

Re:What, no link ?

[halcyon1234]

I'm just waiting for someone to post a link to a 30 second long clip of the Super Bowl that ends with no porn.

BOWLROLLED!

Re:What, no link ?

[griffjon]

Taken down for TOS violation. Was it because it was porn or because it was rebroadcasting the superbowl?

Re:FTA

[Hatta]

I'll show you 30 seconds of full male nudity for $10.

PPV

[Fnord666]

Knowing Comcast, I'm surprised they didn't bill everyone for the whole Pay-Per-View movie!

And Somewhere...

[AioKits]

And somewhere in that mess, someone was enjoying some porno only to have their fantasy broken by the defensive line of the Cardinals.

Re:And Somewhere...

[genner]

And somewhere in that mess, someone was enjoying some porno only to have their fantasy broken by the defensive line of the Cardinals.

Some people are in to that.

Re:And Somewhere...

[Shakrai]

And somewhere in that mess, someone was enjoying some porno only to have their fantasy broken by the defensive line of the Cardinals.

Yeah, where's my $10, you bastards? That KY doesn't pay for itself you know.... ;)

Link?

[A. B3ttik]

Can we get a link to the Porn?

I googled "Porn" and nothing came up.

Re:Link?

[Fnord666]

I googled "Porn" and nothing came up.

But did it suggest pr0n as an alternate search term?

Irony...

[MojoRilla]

Several years ago when my home team was in the Superbowl, my comcast cable went out for several hours during the game. Their response was tough luck. They weren't willing to give me any credit. So it is pretty ironic that people "exposed" to 30 seconds of porn are getting $10 back. The moral of the story is that corporations are only responsible when the news media shames them.

It's a broadcast. It may invoke revenue clauses.

[fishbowl]

Laugh about the porn clip (I did, here in Tucson, I yelled "FTW!")

But depending on the origin of the video, Comcast may be on a very real hook for broadcasting copyrighted material without license, and could conceivably be exposed to distribution royalties for a much larger audience than the one that is supposed to be limited to a specific, accountable pay-per-view arrangement.

I would be very surprised if lawyers were not working this out in a damage control mode.

Re:four hours of violent smashing is not porn?

[BiAthlon]

You're doing it wrong.

Malicious or ignorant?

[daveywest]

I work for a CATV operator, and my desk is 200 feet from the headend. There is no way that could have been a glitch. The real question is was it a malicious or ignorant act of an employee. Regardless, the unemployment rate just went up in Tucson.

Re:Malicious or ignorant?

[TheSync]

Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs.

Here is where the problem could have occured:

1) Video input problem: MSO Satellite Radio tuned to wrong channel. Doubtful because of authentication / encryption. This is more likely if the east coast/west coast feed of the same provider got swapped. Also if the MSO was using an over-the-air TV receiver, that of course can't happen. If the MSO gets a video fiber from the TV station, that might be a fiber carrier routing screw up.

2) Video router misconfiguration: Ff the satellite radio outputs baseband video, it may go through a video crosspoint swtich (they call them "routers"). The wrong crosspoints between the satellite radios and the modulators (analog tier) or encoders (digital tier)

3) Multiplexer/CherryPicker misconfiguration: On the digital tier, MPEG-2 programs are multiplexed together into a QAM. It is possible there was a brief misconfiguration.

Big question - did this happen on the Comcast SD digital tier, HD digital tier, the analog tier, or some combination? If it was both analog and digital SD, I would suspect a video router crosspoint misconfiguration. If it was just digital SD or digital HD, I would suspect a multiplexer misconfiguration.

Meanwhile, back at the Butt-Bowl . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

". . . huh, huh . . huh, huh . . . Beavis, we're like watching Cum-Cast now . . ."

". . . heh, heh . . . hehehe . . . Wait they're showing football again . . . change it! Change it!"

And where's MY ten dollars?

[meist3r]

I had to watch 30 seconds of Super Bowl right inbetween my porn. That's so not cool Comcast.

comcast

[gEvil (beta)]

So this is the Superbowl "Package" Deal that Comcast was advertising, huh?

They're showing the real game...

[need4mospd]

They're just showing what the sportscasters were watching anyways. "Check out that penetration!" "Yeah John, you can see the backfield has been totally violated." "If he got his hands on that ball, he would have scored for sure."

Re:They're showing the real game...

[Anonymous Coward]

...getting all the way through to the clitoris...

Judging by your idea of the female anatomy, I would expect your slashdot UID to be lower...

Just like the movie 'Hackers'

[Agent0013]

See, that movie wasn't all that ridiculous. That is probably what happened. Some 'Zero Cool' dude must have hacked into the network and changed the channel!

Other TV hacks

[twistah]

I love when stuff like this happens. In the past, there have been incidents such as when someone switched over a feed of Jeopardy to the Playboy Channel. Other notable incidents:

Max Headroom Incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdgAMYjYSs
HBO "Captain Midnight" incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFlMHCdYXLM

30 Seconds from Tucson

[d0n0vAn]

As an accounting major, I am just doing the math: 30 seconds of pr0n equals $10 dollars...so, that's $20 a minute and $1200 dollars an hour. By my calculations, I can watch two hours of pr0n each month and be able to pay my tuition instead of taking student loans. What a country!!!

*NOT* interested

[DrYak]

Trust him.

Once he has seen the time-consuming, noisy, loud and dirty results that started appearing 9 months after the "insertion", he'll never ever be even interested in inserting his penis anywhere.

Re:*NOT* interested

[mustafap]

>How does your statement explain the 2nd child? And the 3rd? I'm a 4th child of a married couple

Alcohol.

Re:*NOT* interested

[Hork_Monkey]

Mailman.

Re:*NOT* interested

[ScrewMaster]

>How does your statement explain the 2nd child? And the 3rd? I'm a 4th child of a married couple

Alcohol.

Catholicism.

Re:*NOT* interested

[Ihmhi]

Catholic Alcoholic Mailman.

edge of their seats...

[howman]

was that during the game or the penis flash?

People noticed?

[Lennort]

With Madden talking about penetration and strong man hands the whole time I'm surprised anybody even noticed.

comcastsuperbowlporn.com traffic

[jabberwock]

I emailed the guy who grabbed the domain and posted the video. Traffic: 178,000-plus the first day.

http://www.intotemptation.net/2009/02/03/super-bowl-porn-postmortem/

Unfortunately for him ... he had no plan to monetize the traffic at all.

How fast do you think traffic will drop off? My guess is ... down 80 percent in 30 days ...

$10?

[linuxosinside]

I would have claimed developing a porn addiction and demanded free porn for the rest of the year.

Thanks Madden

[Main Gauche]

Most amusing was, after they cut back to the SuperBowl, you hear Madden saying "He went to the perfect guy, in the perfect situation."

When I was 17. . .

[BitterAndDrunk]

When I was 17 my father said the following: "the reason God made kids so cute is so people would have more than one of them before they turned into teenagers."

Re:When I was 17. . .

[MidnightBrewer]

You were pretty lucky. My parents said they were made cute so that they wouldn't be tempted to kill them.

Bird porn.

[hack slash]

I don't get it, what's so bad about some superb owl porn?

Why pay 10 bucks for that when free?

[freaker_TuC]

While you can have it for free at Comcast?

Simple answers to simple questions...

[_KiTA_]

Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?

Yes.

A view from Europe

[Don_dumb]

It would be massively more exciting if they didn't keep throwing adverts and extended half time breaks in. It's a great way to lose the tension and the moment - several minutes of drinks adverts.

PS - if you need Cheerleaders, you don't have an atmosphere.

Last penis

[Ostracus]

"Who here that has a penis ISN'T interested in inserting it everywhere?"

But does it blend? Oh wait!

Injecting signals into cable TV

[Skapare]

Although the tap to each home attenuates the signal quite a bit, it is possible for people to inject signals into the cable system. It won't go beyond the first amplifier unless its frequency is in the uplink band and that signal won't be redistributed. But it does mean people can distribute weak signals around their neighborhood. On frequencies the cable company isn't using, it won't take a lot of signal to communicate with your neighbors. For example you could run your own neighborhood LAN over the cable wires.

It would take a LOT of signal power to take over an existing signal. You'd have to boost it as much as the attenuator tap reduces it, plus the additional amount to take over the signal on that channel. But it would be possible. So what I'm curious about is just how widespread this porn was seen in Tuscon.