News Helicopters Collide While Filming Police Chase

We can't just dial up another station's helicopter. We have to track the chopper on our own microwave receive site, and not all receive sites are in the same location.

I'm not an expert on the technical aspects of this, but I don't think we can track another station's chopper, and I don't think we can turn around and feed our chopper signal to the competition without a satellite uplink, and that's not going to happen.

 

PC, I won't bore the rest of the board with tech details, so I'll PM more later, but I do know that most markets are tied together easily between stations via fiber. One would have to receive the chopper signal and feed to the others. Also, fiber is a lot cheaper per event than it is to fly a chopper.

 

Saw this on one of the local stations here last night. They had a legal expert on and he was saying the laws in Arizona are a lot broader than other states in regard to this.

Apparently, if a death occurs during the commission of a felony, even if it isn't directly related to the initial crime, that person can be charged with murder.


I'm with you tho. No way the guy should be charged with murder. The copters didn't have to be up there.

 

I can understand why some of the print-oriented posters among us are questioning the news value of the event leading up to the accident.

Just keep in mind, however, that newspaper web sites are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about using video and other multi-media content. It's merely a matter of time before misguided bean-counters get enthusiastic about posting these things online whenever they're available.

They envision increased ad dollars from the extra traffic, even though much of that traffic will be coming from outside the metro market and will be fairly useless in terms of revenue potential. I spent a chunk of my career educating our myopic majority on the subject, but some are slow learners.

 

None of that explains why we need the Robert Duvall scene from Apocalypse Now every time some idiot steals a car.
Pool coverage would suffice.

 

How many viewers of this type of coverage will now be watching to see if the helicopters crash instead of the cars?