Some area viewers weren’t able to watch Comcast SportsNet’s telecast of the Maryland-Virginia Tech men’s basketball game Sunday night.

Adelphia Communications customers in Blacksburg never saw the game, while Cox Communications customers in Roanoke and Roanoke County saw the telecast give way to a black screen during the second half. CSN stayed dark well after the game.

CSN communications coordinator Stephanie Offen said Monday the problem was related to Sunday’s winter storm. She said it was also a problem for CSN viewers in Richmond. She placed the blame on the local cable systems.

"It was ice on the dish where they receive the signal," Offen said. "Once they realized they were having problems, they took the necessary measures to fix it, whether it was cleaning off the dish or heating the dish. … It was weather on their end."

But Mike Pedelty, public affairs director for Cox’s Roanoke office, blamed CSN. He noted that CSN was the only one of Cox’s channels to go to black.

"If we had a weather-related problem, it would happen on all of our channels, not just one," he said. "It sounds to me like an uplink problem that they probably had."

"The reason that it could be our channel [that went dark] as opposed to the other channels is that they receive our channel on a separate dish," Offen said.

—Mark Berman