POWER FAILURE HALTS NFL TELECAST

Two power outages at the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey disrupted Fox’s coverage of the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game during the third quarter on Sunday — and halted play, once for about three minutes, then for 12 minutes, while stadium engineers worked to restore the stadium’s lighting. But once up, the network’s expensive computer equipment was slow to reboot, leaving technical personnel hamstrung, unable, for example, to overlay graphics, including the score of the game and time remaining, over the camera images. The stadium released a cryptic statement to explain the outage: “Power was lost when one of the two feeders to the stadium experienced a power interruption. The power source to the stadium was then switched to the second feeder.” It did not indicate what had caused the initial interruption. In any event, the disruption appeared to have little or no effect on the game’s ratings. The 7:00 p.m. primetime overrun picked up a whopping 21.95 million viewers. Later in the evening NBC’s Sunday Night Football coverage of the Patriots-Steelers game averaged 19.04 million viewers.