Instant Replay

Did it thrill you, too? Watching the Dragons football game on the local television channel SVTV27 and seeing, new this year, instant replay?
Thanks to the imaginative genius of computer engineer Bob Smith, our community’s little station joins “the big time.” With four cameras covering all the Dragon home games, SVTV on Comcast had been rivaling the coverage of some actual TV stations, and now with instant replay capability, Sonoma is surely the envy of all.
We need to acknowledge that Three House MultiMedia Inc., the parent company of the Sonoma Valley Sun, manages the cable channel, but that doesn’t lessen our excitement. Maybe booth announcers Tim Livingston and Dave Sandoval don’t have a “telestrator,” but what an addition the instant replay makes for the viewers at home, and for the team watching the game the next day.
We’re also happy to see the growing partnership of SVTV with Sonoma Valley High School. The video program at the school, under the expert guidance of enthusiastic teacher Peter Hansen, operates from a facility unequalled among public high schools in Northern California. Students in his classes can shoot and edit film in “HD” (high definition), and students in his expanded broadcast program are scripting, directing and performing in newscasts broadcast within the high school, soon to be a regularly scheduled feature on SVTV for our whole community to enjoy.
We send a shout-out of special thanks to camera operators Alex Freeman, Richard Burnham and Jesse U’Ren and to new on-field personality Alicia Armstrong, who is one of this year’s student body officers at the high school. Whether or not the students opt for careers in the burgeoning media field, the hands-on experience they can get with SVTV now will help them in myriad ways.
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Gosh, we wish we had instant replay capability in our own lives. Actually, instant pre-play might be more useful. You know, where you see what you’re GOING to say, before you say it. Where you see what you’re going to do, before you do it.
Now, wouldn’t that have been useful? At senior prom, perhaps? Maybe the first time out with the family car? Or during that awful job interview?
Few expressions are as true as the one about not being able to “unring” a bell. We may be kind and generous 99 percent of the time, but it’s those troublesome lapses that we just can’t take back – those are the ones that haunt us.
In our view, our parents had it right when they encouraged us to “look both ways before you cross” – now we understand that means both backward and forward, too