Just before President Barack Obama's inaugural speech ended this morning -- reportedly one of the most-watched events of all time -- Duluth's CBS and NBC affiliates switched to some local commercials.
"I was just so dumbfounded that I was watching a commercial now," said Matthew Northrup, who grabbed for his television, and switched from Channel 6 to 3, only to encounter another commercial.
"He was going through what George Washington said during the height of the Revolutionary War," Northrup said, and all of a sudden, a commercial.
"We've gotten between 60 and 70 phone calls and 12 e-mails," said Dave Jensch, station manager at Northland's News Center, which includes both KBJR and KDLH, shortly after the speech.
He said an engineer trying to repair a backup server that wasn't online somehow triggered another server to switch to a commercial break, causing an eight-second delay on KDLH Channel 3 and a 15-second delay on KBJR Channel 6.
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"I almost had a heart attack," he said.
Station officials planned to rerun the speech Tuesday evening.
While Northrup, of Sawyer, said he knows he can read the text and view the video at multiple sites later, he said seeing the speech live was just something special. And because he didn't have cable, he couldn't find another good station elsewhere when the commercials came on.
"This is something major here," Northrup said of the speech. "It's just the whole, 'Where were you when this happened?' "
