Bumpy start for Evening News simulcast

The first-ever live simulcast of a network evening news broadcast was plagued with problems when Katie Couric debuted tonight. At first, the player took forever to load. For a few, it finally loaded and played. For others it never loaded at all. In my case, I tried to play the “on demand” version of the newscast at 7:30 p.m. (I entered a New York zip code to get around the time zone blocker — it airs at 8:30 p.m. ET on the West Coast), but it played the pre-roll ad five times in a row before the newscast began. Staci over at PaidContent tried to play it on a variety of platforms and browsers, but no luck. When it finally did play, the quality was top notch. And hey, I imagine CBSNews.com is getting hammered with traffic. In fact, I’ll venture to guess they’ve set a record.