Early Election Night Loser: CNN Election Matrix

I’m not going to wait any longer to give CNN’s Election Matrix a colossal thumbs down. I’m not giving it a thumbs down because it isn’t an interesting idea or because the information is not being presented in an interesting way. No, I’m giving it a thumbs down because the system used to generate it has more bugs than a bait store and it clearly is not ready for use.

Last week when it first appeared I shouted an alarm at the buggy twitchy-ness it had as the Matrix bounced all over the place and wouldn’t sit still, which is a deal breaker for any VR object. I had hoped that CNN would be able to fix the problem by tonight but it’s now obvious that CNN couldn’t fix it, and probably realized it was the way it was and decided it had to roll the dice and use it anyways since they already made a big deal out of it.

Had the twitch been the only issue, you probably wouldn’t be reading this post at this time. However a new wrinkle manifested itself this morning on American Morning when I thought I saw the entire screen, minus the lower third graphics, start twitching. That twitch was small but I still saw it. However, tonight it really showed up bad when one particular camera that’s used to display the Matrix panned across the room from Wolf Blitzer to John King and the picture looked like a bad broadband video podcast. I’ll bet that the rest of the night CNN starts using jump cuts when going to King in order to minimize the manifestation of this problem as much as possible.

Sometimes cutting edge technology is too cutting edge and I think we’re seeing it tonight on CNN. The technology behind Election Matrix obviously wasn’t ready for broadcast. And like past technological gambits the network has tried on election night, CNN comes off looking bad.