The bumper…I don’t know what it’s called…that little clip with the snow that fades in and reveals the logo.
It’s terrible.
For one, a lot of people actually don’t know what TV static is. Analog broadcasts stopped almost 16 years ago, and before that, most younger people had cable.
For another, static is really difficult to compress. It looks horrible and consumes way too much bandwidth for just a couple of seconds that won’t even load right. If anything, they should cache a local copy of the bumper in-app in a format that doesn’t look like ass when every pixel changes every frame.
The 1984 Gibson novel Neuromancer begins with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”
At the time, this unambiguously meant the speckled gray of analog TV static: radio noise amplified and played out through a CRT’s scanning electron gun. However, before too many years had passed, new TVs started displaying a solid blue screen when tuned to a dead channel.
And in 1996, Neil Gaiman riffed on Gibson’s line, in Neverwhere: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”