I had a long hospital stay for appendicitis about 1969, when I was in the fifth grade, and my mother finagled a single but small hospital room for me. After a day she brought the old BW TV from our family room; my siblings were NOT pleased that they had to watch TV with the 'rents. I was in heaven, watching shows that I wanted to watch, plus it was on a cable system so they carried ABC, which we couldn’t get on an antenna at home. More than once I had to go on a walk or down the hall for some reason, only to find the nurses had changed the channel to watch one of their shows. I bet they tried to keep me out of my room as long as possible.
HBO, the first TV channel available a la carte (and commercial + edited-for-TV free) began broadcasting 24-hours pretty early on-- like when I was still in junior high.
We had neighbors who always had everything cool. They had two or three TVs in the house, all color, the kids got guitar lessons instead of only symphonic instruments, and their grandfather drove them around in the back of his pick-up. They also had two dogs and three or four cats. And there was always some candy or cookies in the house.
Anyway, they had cable, and as soon as it was available, HBO. My parents had no idea I’d seen R-rated movies there, like, OMG! Orca! I wasn’t even allowed to see PG movies at the time. My mother wasn’t even sure I ought to be watching the old Universal monster movies on late night TV. On the B&W portable we had, that had an aerial.
The cable explosion, which began with this trickle, had a lot to do with things, but I think technology did too. It took many fewer people to run a station all night. By 1980, it probably just took a few trouble-shooters, and one guy who knew where everything was kept. Now, I’ll bet 50% of trouble-shooting is internal, and the other 40.5% can be done remotely. When a person does need to be there, it’s probably cheaper to switch to some alternate programming source for 30 minutes while someone is paged to come in, than to pay someone to be there for an 8 hr. shift every night.
On the consumer end, VCRs probably played a big role too, though, as someone else suggested. In the early days, even though people FF’d through commercials, they still saw them, and the fact that tons of public domain stuff was finding distributors to release it cheaply on video, TV stations could now get content way cheaper than previously.
There was a guy in Indiana who hosted late-night weekend horror movies. Rose up out of a coffin around 10pm, and climbed back into in around 2. I saw everything from Bride of Frankenstein to A Bucket of Blood.
He had some kind of mid-grade vampire costume, and went by the name Sammy Terry.
I watched the show for years, beginning when I was maybe 8. I was maybe 17 when the pun finally occurred to me.
HBO didn’t broadcast 24 hours initially. For a number of years they offered movies, sports, and specials in the evening hours only. Some local cable providers may have switched to other channels in the off hours when they became available. That was certainly done for other cable channels. The initial HBO customers came from local cable companies that were already servicing areas with poor broadcast coverage in NE Pennsylvania. They weren’t necessarily a la carte in the early distribution when the price was wrapped up in the basic cable service.
For the longest time the magic number used to be 100 episodes. That got a station a nice minimum of 20 weeks of programming which was good for strip programming. These days, with less episodes per season, more channels, streaming, etc the new rule of thumb is 88. But whatever the number is, it mostly just comes down to the rights holders calculating “how many episodes do we need before we can start charging the stations a lot more money?”
I worked in Master Control in the early-mid 90s and turning off the transmitter was a Very Big Deal because getting it back up was a huge production. We would go to color bars and that’s why you’d see test patterns.
Back in the day, it just wasn’t worth it. You still had to pay a master control operator, still had to license programming that no one was going to watch and, if something screwed up, were just as liable to the FCC as you were at noon.
With all the streaming options looking for content there isn’t any practical minimum anymore. Almost every series ever made is now available, sometimes with only 1 season, sometimes with 1 very short season. 1 off specials are available also.
It could all change rapidly. There’s going to be some limit to how much consumers and advertisers will pay for the content and many contracts will not get renewed after this initial expansion.
The ideal will be where it’s like a Blockbuster mixed with your local library - you connect to your favourite streaming service, they all offer anything available from the past 120 years of audio-visual media, and you watch at your leisure. (Youtube with no limits?)
Unfortunately, greed and licensing get in the way of that. It will be a while.
The reason for the wriiters (and actors) striking now is because the old model of many episodes, followed by solid reruns and syndication - with associated royalties to participating employees - is dying. TV shows fewer movies and sydicated shows, there are fewer episodes in the stremers’ shows, and they tend not to release them to broadcast TV.
At least with broadcast TV the whole set of episodes was shown, often over and over, creating income for writers and actors. With streamers, it (I assume) depends on how many watch over the life of the show, and maybe sporadic viewers once the hype dies down. Less income. And while a streaming service has the series, it won’t be licensed anywhere else.
All those time slots that used to be filled with reruns and old movies - after school, late night - are now filled with less expensive game show schlock and revenue-generating infomercials. Partly that’s corporate greed, but a lot of the blame also falls on the plethora of choices that has fragmented the audience - they are no longer captive to a handful of broadcast stations.
Well, the topic wasn’t really streaming, it was syndication. As long as linear television programming is alive (Nick at Night, TBS, your local stations, etc) there is going to be a practical minimum for syndication.
I remember HBO used to sign off at 2 or 3 am because they had a cute animated thing where all the pets were put up for the night and the lights were turned off and such
Also in the mid-80s, the first infomercials I saw were on during the day and primarily real estate rip-offs with some snotty Asian guy who showed off how rich he was by driving sports cars and speed boats with barely dressed models in fact SNL spoofed the hell out of them in the late 90s
Don’t forget the midgets and “location, location, location”.
Essentially they pushed the thing about buying up options, then trying to resell the property, but they didn’t give much detail about thatin the actual commercial, they wanted you to sign up for the (paid) seminar.
Funny thing, my late brother-in-law got rich that way, long before the commercials. My nephew once mentioned they were still getting money for a 99-year lease his dad had worked out with some company.
Even when you ordered the book (I had the chance to read one for free) it’s really light on details, with helpful hints like, “convince the buyer to take back a second mortgage.” Perhaps art of convincing is covered in a second book, with the details of what a second mortgage would entail for both the buyer and seller explained in a third book.
One of the earliest late night hucksters I recall was some guy with one arm wearing a straw hat and running what was called an auction. He would announce some device that was available for sale, say a coffee maker, a small audience seated on folding chairs would act like they were bidding on the items, until the guy spouted something like “Sold for $19.95! Order now and you can have it for the same price!” Eventually Home Shopping Network and others took the concept of TV sales big time on 24 hour cable channels, and there are still smaller specialized operations I see on later night hours such as knife sales.
This has been making the rounds on various FB groups for people who are old enough to remember (or at least to have first known about it as something in the recent past).
Everything on there tests a particular potential issue or problem with a TV picture. It’s strange to think of now, but I’m old enough to remember when TVs had a lot more controls, because a lot more controls were needed. Brightness and contrast controls still exist in onscreen menus, but back in the day there was also vertical hold, horizontal hold, and fine tuning. If you didn’t tune it right the picture might roll vertically; if the antenna wasn’t correct you might get “snow” or an otherwise indistinct picture. If memory serves there were also possible problems with the picture “warping”, though I don’t remember if that was caused by tuning issues or by hardware failures in the TV.
The woman who designed the test pattern once said she put the Indian there just because there was an empty space, but I’m skeptical. ISTM the Indian was ideal for showing how well a finely detailed image was displayed on a black and white screen.
In the Goode Olde Days the whole electronics for broadcast TV (any other kind?) was analog. The vertical and horizontal hold were snagged and hopefully locked off the peaks in the video signal. The vertical and horizontal sweep were sawtooth wave generators, so there was some tuning to sharpen and linearize the sweep. Since tuning for the video or sound signal was LC-circuit, the accuracy could vary with temperature, signal, and the phases of the moon (joke). The amplification of the signal could be adjusted for contrast. If you got very technical, the focus of the magnetic sweep of the electron beam was adjustable, since it needed analog tuning particularly for wider flatter screens where the focus varied from middle to edge. Worse with colour TV, three beans to focus, and they had to go precisely through the grid in front of the phosphor screen so each beam impacted the correct spot; plus the adjustment of the phase detection of the video signal which determined hue. (Remember the “green flesh” look?)
The old Indian Head helped with checking focus, sharpness, horizontal / vertical linearity, the edges not cut off, grey scale, etc.
Cheech: “Hey, man… whatcha doin’?”
[static-y TV noise]
Chong: “I’m watching a movie about indians, but it’s really boring…”
Just to add to what @md-2000 said just above, yes, analog TV had more to adjust, and additionally, more primitive early TVs had still more adjustments than later analog TVs. “Fine tuning” was just what the name implied, and I still remember on my parents’ old set it was a ring around the channel selector. There was an optimum point between the picture being too fuzzy and disintegrating entirely where it had the best sharpness.
Vertical and horizontal hold had to do with synchronizing the TV’s internal oscillators with the station’s sync signals for each frame and scan line (vertical blanking interval and individual line sync, respectively), IIRC. If vertical hold was off the picture would roll, if horizontal hold was off it would break up into diagonal bars.
In the good ol’ days all three of those, along with the usual brightness and contrast and a few other controls, were considered primary controls and located right at the front of the TV. On my parents’ old set, only the channel selector and fine tuning ring and volume control were always exposed, the others were behind a little door because they were used less frequently. To my childhood eyes, opening the little door revealed an impressive plethora of little knobs worthy of a spaceship!
Later CRT televisions, though still analog, dispensed with fine tuning and vertical and horizontal hold as with improved technology those could be reliably automated.
If by “warping” you mean non-linearity in the picture, the kind that would turn the circle in the test pattern into an egg shape, and cause the grid lines in the pattern to be bent, those could be adjusted with secondary (or “maintenance”) controls. Those would adjust the basic alignment of the TV itself, irrespective of the broadcast signal. Those sorts of controls tended to be hidden and generally intended for technicians. Sometimes they were at the back of the TV, and sometimes required removing the back panel.
In newer analog tube TVs, like the Sony Trinitron which was the last tube-type TV I owned, the maintenance controls, like most of the other controls, were all adjusted with the remote control. To keep the average everyday doofus from messing with these secondary controls, you had to enter a “secret” keypad sequence on the remote that put the TV into maintenance mode and brought up the appropriate adjustment menus.
According to Wikipedia’s description of the Indian head test pattern, every portion of which had a purpose, the Indian head’s main purpose was to adjust brightness and contrast. However, I suspect that since those were trivial adjustments that also varied with program material, the idea that it didn’t have a particularly important purpose was probably correct. Many TV stations replaced it with their own station logos. Apparently the Saudi TV network replaced it with an image of the country flag.
I remember sometime in the ‘80s a new chip became available that replaced the old analog horizontal and vertical drives, and obviated the need for controls. It worked by counting the individual lines and phase locking the vertical frame sync from this.
How times change. There would have been vastly more active devices in this little chip than the rest of the TV.
When one considers that a fully operational TV could be built entirely out of thermionic devices, one has a lot of respect for the engineers of the time. Semiconductors are a luxury.
A possibly apocryphal story is that low-cost TV manufacturer Muntz was able to build a less expensive set by buying the best TVs made and yanking out tubes and wiring until they got to the bare minimum which would allow the set to still receive a picture and sound. Since most of the expendable tubes served basically to amplify signals from other tubes, it meant that Muntz models really only functioned in areas with extremely strong signals and when hooked up to a good rooftop antenna.