A lot of movies do the ‘corrupted digital stream’ with boxy digital artifacts. They use it even for things that don’t have a digital stream, like cameras, which is silly but it works as a shorthand.

It is funny when they do use static for digital media though.

I guess an MP4 file that won’t open because it’s corrupted or a spinning circle on a streaming service just isn’t as theatrical.

You will get a freeze frame only if the demuxer and/or decoder was written by competent people and detects errors properly. In many cases the playback will attempt to continue with artifacts (though they still look very differently from analog static).

Cloverfield was my breaking point. Overwriting digital files doesn’t work that way.

Reading The Expanse at the moment and there is an analogue (no pun intended) of this: communication through the Gates is affected by some kind of weird interference, which is audible as strange whistling/ringing in audio. But surely they’re using digital, encrypted signals for these connections (rather than broadcasts)! It should result in a degraded bandwidth or corruption, not whatever that is.

Though now I think about it, DAB radio does get a kind of watery noise when there’s poor signal, so maybe it’s not completely unrealistic. If anyone knows enough about DAB to explain that, I’m interested.