If you count ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS as the original TV networks – not counting that oldie Dumont – what’s the first channel other than those that you can remember seeing? Was it broadcast, satellite or cable? What show(s) did it have?
If you’re non-USA-American, what’s the oldest TV provider in your country? What’s the oldest program you remember seeing there?
Is there a still older network in the USA? (I didn’t start seeing TV on a regular basis until 1955.)
Share your oldest TV memories here.
It was called OnTV, later purchased by SelecTV. I think it predated HBO, or came out at the same time.
It was pay cable, but only a single channel with it’s own box. They had old movies, soft porn late at night, etc.
This would have been around 1979?
Channel 44 in SF, Ca. Home of brady bunch reruns and creature features.
Channel 61 WKPF-TV in Cleveland OH which showed cartoons, I Love Lucy and the above-mentioned creature features. Now it broadcasts Univision .
Back when, in Portland there were three channels:
KPTV 12 ABC
KGW 8 NBC
KOIN 6 CBS
(I don’t recall when KOPB 10 PBS started.)
Sometime in the early 60s KATU 2 was started. It then managed to become the ABC affiliate and KPTV went independent. So it was KATU for my official answer but not for that long.
Lots of movies, kid shows*, cheap government and industry films. Portland Wrestling and Tom Peterson.
Earlier, in the 50s we lived in the middle of nowhere. My step-father wired the town for cable so we could get two channels. A Portland network station and a Pendleton (?) station. I think the later picked shows from 2 networks. Stooges shorts, Friday Night Fights and lots of westerns.
*Heck Harper, Ramblin’ Rod and Matt Groening’s personal nightmare: Rusty Nails.
When I first saw TV the channels were
WSFA – 12 – NBC
WCOV – 20 (UHF) – CBS
Both Montgomery Alabama
Nashville’s were
4 – WSM-TV (later WSMV) – NBC
5 – WLAC-TV (later WTVF0 – CBS
8 – WSIX-TV (later WKRN) – ABC
2 – forget the original letters – PBS
There was a big much-hyped “channel swap” when 2 and 8 exchanged channels. Channel 8 is now the PBS station, WNPT.
I still can’t recall the next channel to come available before cable. I am almost certain there was at least one. Most likely a religious channel. There are at least five now on cable from this area. CATV was in there somewhere if you want to count that! Man, some really useless stuff on that channel.
That would be WTVF), not WTVF0. Preview and shift-key are my friends
I would say WPIX in NYC. They use to show lots of Bugs Bunny. The Station is about to become CW and it has been WB since WB got going.
I watch WPIX more than any other Independant station growing up in the 70’s.
They had Bugs Bunny, Star Trek, Yankees Baseball, Odd Couple and eventually Happy Days & Barney Miller.
We had no Cable until I was a teen in the 80’s.
Jim
I lived in Southern Ontario, in the reception area of the Buffalo stations: WGR - 2 - NBC, WBEN - 4 - CBS and WKBW - 7 - ABC.
In the early '60s, there was only the CBC for national programming, which came from CBLT, Channel 6, Toronto (now it’s on 5). We also got CFTO, Channel 9, Toronto and CKCO, Channel 13, Kitchener, which were independent stations before they joined the CTV network, which is headquartered at CFTO. A long-standing independent was CHCH, Channel 11, Hamilton. It was independent up to the 1990s, when it became its own superstation, similar to WGN, and changed its call letters to CHTV.
I have only the vaguest recollection of programs on Channel 11, but “Tiny Talent Time” loomed large in our lives. My granmother was a seamstress, and she made costumes for a lot of the kids who sang and danced on that show. The same guy who hosted that, Bill Lawrence (the weather man), had another kid’s show with a set that looked like a living room, and there was a puppet that appeared from behind a curtain, but I can’t remember for the life of me what the show was called. I went for a tour of the station once, and saw that set, and was disappointed to learn that almost all of it was painted on sheets of cardboard. It looked perfectly normal on TV.
Similarly, I don’t remember much about Channel 9, except that they had a weather man who stood behind a plexiglass map of Canada, and wrote temperatures on the back side of it with chalk, backwards, with both hands. This might have been from a time before they had the technology to do video superimposition. We used to watch “Davey And Goliath” shorts, done in stop-animation with clay and other figures, and the Hercules cartoons on that channel.
The biggest thing about Channel 13 was Big Al. He was the kids’ show host, who came out in a white cowboy hat and flashy cowboy jacket with intricate, sparkly designs on it. I’m only one of millions of Ontario residents who raced home at noon to watch Big Al. He showed cartoons, and he’d read letters from kids. He had a birthday segment, where he’d show pictures of the birthday kid, and read their names and the family members who wished them a happy birthday - and he’d always pronounce them wrong. Big Al was famous, man! He did personal appearances at shopping centers and everything. I got to shake his hand once, and I remember saying, “I’ll never wash that hand again!” He was the most famous person I’d ever met. One time in the '70s, I met my best friend’s uncle, who worked at CKCO, and he told us that Al’s last name was Jones. And that he was a surly, obnoxious guy who hated kids, and his show. We couldn’t believe it! Although by that time, we were past the age of wanting to watch him anyway. The other thing I remember about Channel 13 was that something was always screwing up. Titles upside down and backwards, a show stopping abruptly and then going to the test pattern… they took awhile to get their broadcasting chops together.
I have some TV Guides from the early '60s in a box in the closet. If anyone really, really wants to know what kinds of programs these indies showed back then, I’ll drag them out and post some titles and synopses.
I probabaly watched the triumvriate of NYC independent TV stations (Channel 5 (WNEW), Channel 9 (WOR), and Channel 11 (WPIX)) when I visited my relatives, but didn’t see them regularly until we got cable around 1963.
I grew up in Washington, D.C., where in addition to the Big Three commercial networks and PBS we had WTTG (channel 5), at the time a Metromedia station and now owned by Fox, and WDCA (channel 20), now a UPN affiliate. WTTG was where Maury Povich hung out before becoming famous, hosting an afternoon talk show called Panorama. I also remember watching Wonderama sometimes. WDCA was where I watched Ultraman in the afternoon after coming home from school, with Captain 20 and his chimp races in between shows. This is all broadcast, btw.
Is it fair to hijack my own thread?
Talking about these early shows and networks/stations makes me remember an old show that had Wright King and some puppet/toy called Major Domo. It had a sort of freaky sci-fi or space feel to it. M & M’s were the sponsor and untilt that show I had never eaten any. I though they were brand new candies. This would be mid-50’s or so. I later learned that M & M’s came out the year I was born (1941).
Anybody remember Winky Dink? I think Jack Barry (of 21 notoriety) was the “host” of Winky Dink and you could get this weird little plastic sheet that would adhere to the TV screen. It had blue at the top and green at the bottom and the middle was clear. It helped make some of the westerns look almost like they were in color. and you could draw on it with grease crayons and Jack was always having the audience do some trick on their Winky Dink screens.
Man, how little stuff has changed!
My sisters use to talk about Winky Dink. They would have been young or did it show in syndication in the early 60’s? I see Winky Dink was Olive Oyl or Mae Questel.
Jim
AFN – the Armed Forces Network, which shows on US military bases overseas. It took the “best” shows from the state-side networks, and tried to accommodate everyone’s taste, with predictably limited success. Because of the time lag, almost all sports games were shown in the middle of the night. The most distinctive thing about the network were the commercials: they couldn’t show regular ones, so they’d make up their own military commercials – urging you to shop at the commissary, warnings to vary your route to work lest bad guys were following you, tidbits on American history. Some very cheesy stuff that I remember fondly.
WTTG, Channel 5, Dumont network, Washington D.C. 1949 or so.
In New York, in the 1950s when I started watching, we had
Ch 2: CBS
Ch 4: NBC
Ch 5: Independent, Had Sandy Becker and Soupy Sales in the '60s.
Ch 7: ABC
Ch 9: RKO. Had old people shows, and the Million Dollar Movie.
Ch 11: WPIX, owned by the Daily News. This one had the cartoon shows, and the Three Stooges.
Ch 13: Was an independent before it became a public TV/PBS station. PBS is fairly new.
During the day, after school, I watched 11 and 5 more than anything. This was long before they got affiliated with the newer networks, like Fox.
WGN in Chicago.
Garfield Goose, Ray Rayner, Cartoontown…many others.
I was thrilled when WPMI 15 came on the air as an independent channel in Mobile, AL in the early 80’s. Not too long later, it became the Fox affiliate.
Visiting back since, I notice that somehow, channel 15 is now the NBC affiliate.
Ch 5 - WNEW - Later changed to WNYW and became Fox’s flagship station.
When I watched it as a kid it showed lots of morning cartoons - Woody Woodpecker, etc. as well as reruns of sitcoms in the afternoons/evenings.
Ch 9 - WWOR - Became UPN’s flagship. Probably my first ever favorite show was aired on WWOR - Romper Room. All I ever wanted was to hear my name called out while Miss Whateverhernamewas gazed into the Magic Mirror.
Later it would show some more of my favorite shows, including the Howard Stern Show and The Morton Downey Jr. Show, and one of my most hated, Steampipe Alley with Mario Cantone.
Ch 11 - WPIX - Later became WB’s flagship station. Used to watch this one mostly late at night - Tom and Jerry, The Three Stooges, The Twilight Zone, The Odd Couple, The Outer Limits. And of course March of the Wooden Soldiers on Thanksgiving and The Yule Log in Christmas morning.
Me, too. I grew up in San Jose.