Bad cable TV systems

[3467]

I will tell you about a great small town cable system in 1970. Our town was wired locally and got a microwave relay to get Chicago stations and sports plus we had a newscast from the radio station a weather station and a live text AP news feed.

[bugo]

Back in the 1980s, the local cable provider in my hometown broadcast MTV. Around 1990, a bunch of Fundamentalist Christian fascist nutjobs threw a hissy fit, and the cable provider removed it. This means that for most of my high school days, I didn't have access to MTV. If you're not old enough to remember the 1980s and early 1990s, you can't even begin to comprehend what a cultural juggernaut MTV was in its heyday. So I didn't get to see a lot of things, including when Nirvana blew up in 1991, Beavis and Butthead and Headbanger's Ball. The religious whackos apparently was offended by Madonna. Her music offends me, but I'm not so narcissistic that I want to impose my personal music taste on anybody. Scum of the earth.

[kphoger]

Back in the 1980s, the local cable provider in my hometown broadcast MTV. Around 1990, a bunch of Fundamentalist Christian fascist nutjobs threw a hissy fit, and the cable provider removed it. This means that for most of my high school days, I didn't have access to MTV. If you're not old enough to remember the 1980s and early 1990s, you can't even begin to comprehend what a cultural juggernaut MTV was in its heyday. So I didn't get to see a lot of things, including when Nirvana blew up in 1991, Beavis and Butthead and Headbanger's Ball. The religious whackos apparently was offended by Madonna. Her music offends me, but I'm not so narcissistic that I want to impose my personal music taste on anybody. Scum of the earth.

We didn't have MTV in the town I grew up in either.  But there were fewer than thirty channels total, even with cable.  The only time I ever saw Beavis and Butthead was in hotels on vacation.

I don't feel as though I really missed out on anything, though.

[bugo]

Unless you lived in a rural area, especially in the mountains, where the signals were unreceivable (and the government, in its indifference to Rural Americans, refused to permit repeater stations).  So there came in CATV.  Community Antenna TV.  Which was simply building a single large antenna for the whole area, such that no one person could afford it. 

They had one of these in my mountain hometown. The first non-broadcast station I remember being able to watch was WTCG-17 out of Atlanta. This was in the early 1980s or possibly the very late 1970s.

Now, the "linear model" of TV is on its last legs.  And people are letting the cable company be their ISP.  Why?  They are evil.  They don't care.  They will do the least possible for you. 

I use Cox because it's the only fast option where I live. I used to have AT&T DSL, but it was really slow, which might have been partially because the wiring in the building I lived in was haggard. I have 500 Mbps cable, and the fastest internet that AT&T offers is 75 Mbps. It's not exactly a free market, and I don't have a lot of choices.

[tmoore952]

My parents did not get cable until after I left for college (mid to late 80s), so I also did not have MTV then.

I also don't feel it's a big deal.
About the only time I do notice it is when people in my age group automatically recognize an '80s video that I did not see.

[bugo]

My parents did not get cable until after I left for college (mid to late 80s), so I also did not have MTV then.
I also don't feel it's a big deal

It was a huge deal to me, because I was (and still am) completely obsessed with music. Back then, I was still a kid discovering new music, and MTV was one of the few ways to listen to music there. There were mountains in every direction, and it was hard to pick up the Little Rock stations, which weren't very good, anyway. There were no record stores, only Walmart, which sold bowlderized versions of tapes and CDs back then. I don't know how I ended up being a music fan at all. It was a lot of work back then.

[tmoore952]

My parents did not get cable until after I left for college (mid to late 80s), so I also did not have MTV then.
I also don't feel it's a big deal

It was a huge deal to me, because I was (and still am) completely obsessed with music. Back then, I was still a kid discovering new music, and MTV was one of the few ways to listen to music there. There were mountains in every direction, and it was hard to pick up the Little Rock stations, which weren't very good, anyway. There were no record stores, only Walmart, which sold bowlderized versions of tapes and CDs back then. I don't know how I ended up being a music fan at all. It was a lot of work back then.

Let me clarify what I meant.

It is not a big deal to me now. I am also a big music fan. In the '80s, I was heavliy into '60s music. I also liked '80s music until about the end of 1983, but got turned off by synthesizers. As a result I knew a lot of '80s music but it was not my first love. Later on, I softened my stance a little bit -- some of that had to do with nostalgia, and some of it had to do with getting along with same-aged girlfriends (and then spouses). I knew almost all of the songs - I just didn't (and in many cases, still don't) know the videos.

[kphoger]

It was a huge deal to me, because I was (and still am) completely obsessed with music. Back then, I was still a kid discovering new music, and MTV was one of the few ways to listen to music there. There were mountains in every direction, and it was hard to pick up the Little Rock stations, which weren't very good, anyway. There were no record stores, only Walmart, which sold bowlderized versions of tapes and CDs back then. I don't know how I ended up being a music fan at all. It was a lot of work back then.

I was into music too, and I lived in a small farming town in western Kansas.

This was my friend:

[bandit957]

We could pick up Cincinnati radio stations clearly, but a lot of them were just so bad.

[zachary_amaryllis]

It was a huge deal to me, because I was (and still am) completely obsessed with music. Back then, I was still a kid discovering new music, and MTV was one of the few ways to listen to music there. There were mountains in every direction, and it was hard to pick up the Little Rock stations, which weren't very good, anyway. There were no record stores, only Walmart, which sold bowlderized versions of tapes and CDs back then. I don't know how I ended up being a music fan at all. It was a lot of work back then.

I was into music too, and I lived in a small farming town in western Kansas.

This was my friend:

Those guys are TENACIOUS. 10 years after I did the '10 cassettes for a penny' deal, they were STILL hounding me.

[bugo]

In the beginning, there was OTA TV.  You put up an antenna and got the local stations.
Unless you lived in a rural area, especially in the mountains, where the signals were unreceivable (and the government, in its indifference to Rural Americans, refused to permit repeater stations).  So there came in CATV.  Community Antenna TV.  Which was simply building a single large antenna for the whole area, such that no one person could afford it. 

I grew up in a town surrounded by mountains in every direction and no local TV station that had a system like this. The tower was just west of the Talimena Drive near the former site of Ward Lake, which was Mena's water supply for decades. For years, this antenna would be lit up like a cross in December and early January, which could be seen from all over Mena. It was actually pretty cool.

I remember one day turning the TV on and seeing a new channel, WTGC-17 Atlanta, so that means the antenna service switched to cable no later than 1979.

In as late as the early 1980s. the Mena cable company had a channel that showed meteorological instruments scrolling across the screen. It was similar to the videos below but less primitive. I remember the day it was replaced by a computer-generated text screen, which made me mad. The first video mentions Little Rock, but the station was in Nashville, The music and the voiceover are soothing, and the cards between the dials are adorable.

One of the brands was Weather Scan.

Cable TV is evil.  To understand why, you must simply understand the history of television.

These are some cool videos from free TV advocates. The narrator in the second video says "free baseball".

[ZLoth]

"Free TV", as portrayed by those 1960s and 1970s, is very much a myth. Either you are paying for the product, or you are the product targeted by advertisers based upon demographics. Nowadays, because of retransmission fees for broadcast television and per-subscriber fees for cable channels, it's now both. And those movies were often edited for content, to fit the time slot allocated, and to fit in more commercials.

As for "free baseball", prior to the Regional Sports Networks in the 1990s, only a subset of baseball games were televised in the primary television market (e.g. San Francisco, Oakland), and even a smaller subset was broadcast in secondary television markets (e.g. Sacramento). For NFL games prior to the 1973 season, the home team games were automatically blacked out within 75 miles of the stadium, and from 1973 until 2014, if the game wasn't "sold out" in the home market, it was blacked out also. NFL SUnday Ticket for out-of-market games didn't exist until 1994.

Of course, with the RSN meltdown going on with Bally Sports and AT&T Sportsnet, some broadcast stations are taking over the role of Regional Sports Network.

[golden eagle]

I hear that Spectrum is very terrible.