Building the NBC News Big Board

This. I can't watch people like Harry Ente, not least because of the pain in watching the delay when they draw or click on something.

> Why is the input latency so bad on the display? The touch/draw visibly lags behind by 500ms or more, is that an issue with the software or with the hardware?

One likely factor: the video we're watching is from 2016. I think input latency has gotten more attention (optimization effort) since then.

not sure how it is now, but last time I looked into this it's because the board feed is run back through a control room for color correction, and then back into the display - if you run it directly on the display without color correction it's much better, this is one of the things that annoyed me the most but beyond my scope

A lot of the time this cycle, Kornacki would tap the "Draw/Pen Mode" icon, accidentally write on the screen when he meant to tap a button, tap the same icon to exit draw mode, then actually touch the button he wanted. He did that _so many times_ on stream it was crazy. Wonder if they can wire in a "pen" to get rid of that UX nightmare for him.

I came into the comments to say exactly this! The latency was soooo bad during the recent election coverage.

I bet NBC hasn't touched the code nor the hardware it runs on since it was developed 8 years ago.

idk if the app has been redesigned since 2018, the designs/behavior look similar, but it started as a vue app with d3 and topojson to render the reporting units, visual diffs and some basic unit testing i dunno if vitest was around in 2018 but whatever the equivalent is, but elections are not like any other software, and changes are made at the last minute no matter how disciplined you might be- the real thing was to test, test, test by hand on a spare screen before going to air, often times on set with a few seconds to spare

Yeah I hope that’s a simplification. At the very least I hope some automated testing is scanning that code change in a PR before it gets pulled down to the server.

> worse an error screen they'll screencap and meme.

Or even worse, you misattribute a result to the wrong candidate, it gets screencapped and used as evidence in another “election fraud” conspiracy theory.

I actually think the safety guards they’d add for software like this would be the more interesting part of the story!

Maybe they have the CI even if not the CD…?

True but on election night you’re just changing things from null to one of two strings.

I’ve spent 17 years in news and it’s not uncommon to operate short term journalistic stuff off a Google sheet or xml file. It’s basically fine.

That part stood out to me too. However this article was from 2018, not last week it seems to me.

We did live debugging like this at the time, wouldn’t today.

> Doing that live in an emergency and seeing it on television minutes later is a pretty cool feeling.

I once heard a story of the slomo camera used during MLB games stopped working during a World Series game which meant that a huge feature of the broadcast was going to be unavailable. One of the engineering crew took it upon himself to look into it. Apparently, another camera angle caught the extra person at the camera during the broadcast which was seen by a high ranking executive who promptly called the director to see what was going on. His response boiled down to "someone is either getting fired, or getting promoted". A few innings later, the slomo feature was again available for the broadcast.

Sometimes, you just got to "get 'er done" on the air.