Oddity Archive: Episode 11 - Pay TV (but not Cable or Satellite)

For those forced to use alternate services because your town's local politicians wouldn't allow cable...

[angelsinger]

My grandparents had ON TV in the 80's, because the owner of their "closed community" didn't want cable installers drilling holes in his precious walls...and my grandmother hated missing even a single Reds game (we lived in Dayton at the time). It also sometimes captioned programs (my grandmother was deaf and I am deaf in one ear). That was a big selling point for my grandparents.

Later, my mother would go on to work for yet another now-defunct Dayton cable service in the early 90's: Omnivision. They not only provided cable to the far-flung farming communities in Ohio, but also had a pretty wide range of second-rate video games built in. One involved an alien in a pyramid that I came close to beating when they shut down the games in '96 or so.

[mujtabakamran]

No one complains about those history lessons, so don't worry.

[jcraig]

And to think that this video has more views than Tele1st's subscriber base.

[CrowTRobot-nizu]

My dad had ON-TV for about a year in 1980-81. It ran in our area (Detroit) on WXON TV-20, and our recordings off of it look horrid. It was probably a combination of his distance from the transmitter, and the scrambling technology, which caused a ridiculous amount of multipath interference. All the other stations came in clear as a bell, with the exception of 62, which broadcast with a weak signal.

[MrBenMcLean]

Where can I get a copy of that ON-TV anti-piracy message? It has a really creepy, authoritarian quality to the voice that makes you feel like a real thought criminal.

[tq-jinglesandids]

5:46 - "Presently, your ONTV signal is being electronically scrambled. Because the decoder box in your home is unauthorized. This is a polite way of saying that you're now comitting an illegal act."

I really like the idea on how ONTV were able to fight the TV 'pirates' by not only scrambling the picture, but also play audio warnings too. I wonder if there's a full version of this...

[IVR]

I love the unscrambled clip of the Chinese program from TeleWorst.

[Tornado]

Basic Cable Television Access actually went Nationwide officially on January 1, 1985. ONLY Sparsely populated US towns didn't have Basic Cable.

By 1989. EVERY city in the US had Basic Cable access.

[cryptozoo]

When I was a kid, and before they began offering cable in the town where we lived, we subscribed (briefly) to a pay-TV service that played major studio releases after a certain point in the day (and were off the air for the rest of the time), an odd channel that played bizarre foreign language animated shorts (not certain of the cartoons' countries of origin - it sounded eastern european, however), and another channel that played soft-core porn 24/7. The company declared bankruptcy roughly six months after we had the service installed, and never came back to retrieve/remove the satellite dish from the roof of our house...that thing stayed-up there more than TWENTY years after we'd moved away, and as far as I know, is STILL up there.

[JosephASobora]

My father had "SelecTV" back in the 80s and it was broadcast on KWHY-TV Channel 22 in Los Angeles, his relatives had ON TV in the early 80's, that was on KBSC (KVEA) Channel 52, before was shut down and merged with "SelecTV". It was the network that introduced me to a lot of great movies, some of which I still have the VHS recordings. It was shut down in 1989 and we switched to Cable where I got to watch alot of great channels such as HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Movie Channel, even Nickelodeon.

[SuperCosmicMutantSquid]

I think the glitchy sound from that cooking show is what will greet us in the afterlife.

[muthesquirrel]

We're kinda' going through this again with Netflix, Amazon, Disney etc. A bunch of paid sub sites all fighting for ultimate control over TV programs once again. It'll be interesting seeing them look back at that in 40 years and how stupid and greedy it was.

[seanwilkinson]

I'd watch Titus Chan and any other clickety-scrambled cooking shows if they were offered free on another channel at any time. That theme sounds so awesome with the squeedly-wheedly-deedly distortion, and seeing video in negative never gets dull.

[hey_suss]

In 1982, approximately 95% of NYC still did not have Cable. "Man. Cable" which only served lower Manhattan up to about 38 St. Enter the alternatives. To wit : WWHT aka Wometco Home Television. From NJ they transmitted to NYC on channel 69 (just a few kHz from the Cellular band.) For Long Island customers they had another UHF channel. For technical details of the operation, just watch the above video, it's very similar.

[billybassman]

My dad got that microwave TV around 1986 for a couple of month after he removed the cable. It had two channels. One was a movie channel. The other aired old movies during the day and hard core porn at night. I still have the tapes he recorded of the porn. After that we put an antenna up and used that till we got cable again in 1993.

[l.tc.]

My dad was and still is to this day an early adopter of tech, much to the annoyance of my mother. I was going though some old stuff in The basement while I was looking for some old photos (#10 year Challenge am I right.) and found an ancient ON TV descrambler. This thing was literally a decade older than me. We had cable TV for as long as I was alive so I'm not sure why he kept it. He literally never threw it out.

[pancudowny]

I stumbled across a home-built "pirate" ON-TV decoder a few years ago, and took it home. Of course, by then the service was long-gone... and the one thing worth keeping from any setup--the gold-plated antenna--was impossible to find.

Why the antenna, so-much? It got signals for anything over the airwaves in much better than any other design I've seen... even modern "HD" antennas.

[Lethaltail]

The Tele1st preshow (timer with music) has some decent music. That's the only plus to the entire service. Ouch.

[WillWatchAnything]

As kids we had SelecTV on WCGV in Milwaukee.  The box was a little more advanced than ON TV having a push button on/off switch and a key selector for Regular programs or Special events.  There was also a four digit spin dial on the front for a subscriber code that would change at regular intervals or when they had special events (i.e. boxing matches, concerts, etc.).  We gave it up due to cost, but it survived here until around 1984 when cable became more mainstream.

[ManiacalMichael]

The Tele1st concept is interesting. That may well have been the very first "connected" DRM scheme, seeing that the descrambling code in the device could be updated over the air, and that you needed the device to play the video back. Most of the scrambling systems from back in the day were far less sophisticated.