Party Vibe

this one was from the European bit of ESPN (now bought by British Telecom for BT Sport) – with “multicultural” colour bars based on the US SMPTE ones but optimised for digital feeds. The 1970s video game style “bouncing block” is used to check for a crashed stream (as these just would repeat the last still picture) – ESPN IBCC MCR stands for ESPN International Broadcast Contributions Centre Master Control room.

it appears to be somewhere in the UK, possibly BT Tower London – the surreal note “speak loud, old man” is typically British and makes sense in broadcast engineering – traditionally every male worker in broadcast and telecoms (especially wireless) is called “old man” whether they are 20 or 70+ – and a master control room is where programme material is played out and monitored (often for more than one channel), and often sound from many channels plus the 1khz tone is played out at high volume on loudspeakers, whilst the voice quality comms line to the MCR is often connected to a telephone immediately below these loudspeakers (usually a flashing lamp is used to show it is ringing) and picks up all the racket from them (all BBC studios were set up like this..)

this may also be the Brits mocking the Americans for providing a poor quality comms line (such using VOIP with a low bitrate codec) to save a few cents 😉