How did cable originate, and was it always the same concept
as now…i.e. many many channels? I can say that in my area, L.A., that was definitely NOT how it started. To the best of my memory, it originated here during the mid or late 60’s, and was at first merely intended to provide better reception than we could get with rabbit ears and rooftop antennae. As such it was immediately popular in the hilly residential areas of the Santa Monica Mountains (near Beverly Hills), where, coincidentally, many of the movers and shakers of the film industry made their homes.
After a time, maybe around 1972, the “Z” Channel was introduced…as far as I know the first-ever cable movie channel. During the weeks leading up to the Academy Awards they’d show the movies that were nominated, ostensibly for the benefit of the Academy members in the neighborhood, though perhaps really it was just to brush some of the glamour off on the rest of us workaday stiffs who happened to live in the neighborhood. At any rate, the ‘first run’ movies evidently came out a lot more quickly on “Z” than they now do on HBO.
We also could really watch, in all its glory, PBS. Before the advent of cable everything on PBS looked like it was taking place in a blizzard. Apart from that and “Z”, there were no extra channels.
Can anyone elaborate on this? How did it begin in other areas?
You’ve got the basic beginnings. (CATV got started in the early fifties as a way to get people in poor reception areas good reception.)
Soon people relized that this would saturate the market pretty soon and added “value” so that people in “good” reception areas would sign up.
I remember that the competitor to the Z-Channel was Select TV, an over the air premium channel. I think that WGN and TBS were amoung the first nationwide cable channels.
Yep, WGN is still an over-the-air television station on channel 9 in Chicago. I think there is still a WTBS on channel 17 in Atlanta as well. Some little pipsqueak named Ted Turner got his start there.
Channel 9 does have different programming on its local vs. national feed. The national feed skips the morning news program and shows fewer Chicago Bulls games.
Were/are there any other “superstations” in cable TV history? Why were only TBS & WGN successful at it?
I thought that “The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted” by L. J. Davis explained this in an interesting and entertaining way. Recommended if you are interested in the history of cable.
WGN’s national feed differs somewhat from its local feed because of obligations to show WB Network programming and MLB and NBA were getting upset over the number of Cubs and Bulls games shown.
My cable system ended up dropping WGN out here in California, althougs TBS lives on.
There used to be a rule that you could only have two “superstations” on a cable system, which made systems choose from among WGN, WOR, and WTBS.
The World Book encyclopedia says that cable TV first started in the 1940s.
IIRC, the Z channel in LA was a pay channel. If you ponied up a certain number of $$ per month, you would get a converter box and you could see that particular channel. There was also a channel called “ON”. There was also a third channel. They tried to sell themselves as premium channels when cable TV became more widespread in Southern California in the 1980s, but they didn’t have the resources to keep up with the HBOs and Showtimes of the world.
The company where I used to work, TV/COM formerly Oak, had the patents on much of the conditional access technology in the early analog world. They also built the converter boxes. That was way before my time there though.
While Oak was building the converter boxes, I was a little kid in the San Fernando Valley. I remember having the Z Channel, but I can only remember watching “Tom Sawyer” about a hundred times. I’m sure they had other movies, but I wasn’t interested. On TV and Select came around years later and IIRC were the main players until HBO appeared.
Just as a matter of interest (at least to me), my home town, Weyburn, Saskatchewan, had one of the first cable-TV setups in Canada. The nearest broadcast stations were (and are) in Regina, about 60 miles line-of-sight, and Moose Jaw, a little farther. Even in the prairies that’s a long way for TV, so there’s a very tall tower up on the hill, and with cable we got to actually see the pictures without snow.
I’m from the L.A. area and remember the Z channel quite well. They only showed two movies a night: one at seven o’clock and one at nine. It was the same two movies every night for a week. The movies were generally at least a year old before Z could show them (a regulation at the time - IIRC.) The nine p.m. movie was the main feature for the week. The seven p.m. movie was an encore presentation - something they had shown months earlier. By 1979 or so things began to improve - more showings, wider variety of films, special screenings of Oscar contenders, etc. I think Z folded sometime in the early 80s.
I one had an encyclopedia of television that claimed the first ever cablestaition was the learning channel, only it was called something else at the time.
Oh yeah! I remember now…we had a box with numbered buttons and a long cord which was (I think) hardwired into the box. You could sit in your chair with the box in your lap and change channels by pressing the buttons. Sort of a primitive remote-control. But it was a step above having to
go to the TV and turn the dial. We didn’t have RC TV’s where I grew up (and my parents still don’t).
wrt the extra cost for Z, as I recall it wasn’t very much. It was a good deal.
I don’t know if Z ever existed as a station in its own right. Seemed to me that it was all being offered under the auspices of the local cable company, which was called Theta.
Theta eventually got bought out by Group W (Westinghouse), which became Century, then was finally bought out by Adelphia a little over a year ago. I imagine that Z was
dropped around the time that HBO and Showtime came in.
Cable TV was invented in Mahanoy City, PA – my father-in-law’s hometown. If you go to Mahanoy City (though there really isn’t much of a reason to go) there is a sign that announces Mahanoy City as “The birthplace of Cable TV”.
It all came about because the local hardware store owner got a shipment of TVs, which were relatively new at the time. Because Mahanoy City is surrounded by hills and mountains, he couldn’t get any reception to show off the TVs. So he went to the top of a hill, set up an antenna and ran a cable down to the hardware store. Of course, this first use of cable didn’t have any cable-only stations since he was only getting network television on his sets.
Zoff’s story is the same one I saw on The History Channel (or one of the other channels of that type), but I don’t remember the city being Mahanoy, PA. Could’ve been.