eyewitness info birth of cable tv
 

found this online, but i wanted to say first, several years ago when i got involved with rental properties out in that area (mt. carmel, shamokin and coal township, i met an older woman out there, who helped me with following through on some things for me. She was 75 when i met her. Anyway, she told me, way back in the day, you paid for installtion and the service was FREE!!!


I had some dealings with service electric (first cable company in the country) when we were renovating units.

They gave us free coax, and when we would rewire the electric systems in these homes, we would run rg6 throughout the house. I guess the thought was, more jacks in the house, more chance to charge rental fees on more receivers.

would love to hear from u old timers, about your memories of cable


http://inventors.about.com/library/i...television.htm

Cable television, formerly known as Community Antenna Television or CATV, was born in the mountains of Pennsylvania in 1948.

Community antenna television (now called cable television) was started by John Walson and Margaret Walson in the spring of 1948. The Service Electric Company was formed by the Walsons in the mid 1940s to sell, install, and repair General Electric appliances in the Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania area. In 1947, the Walson also began selling television sets. However, Mahanoy City residents had problems receiving the three nearby Philadelphia network stations with local antennas because of the region's surrounding mountains. John Walson erected an antenna on a utility pole on a local mountain top that enabled him to demonstrate the televisions with good broadcasts coming from the three Philadelphia stations.

Walson connected the mountain antennae to his appliance store via a cable and modified signal boosters. In June of 1948, John Walson connected the mountain antennae to both his store and several of his customers' homes that were located along the cable path, starting the nation’s first CATV system.

John Walson has been recognized by the U.S. Congress and the National Cable Television Association as the founder of the cable television industry. John Walson was also the first cable operator to use microwave to import distant television stations, the first to use coaxial cable for improved picture quality, and the first to distribute pay television programming (HBO). Source Service Electric Cablevision, Inc with special thanks to Rob Ansbach

CED Magazine: 50 Years of Cable Television Technology
A retrospective of the last 50 years of cable TV technology.

The History of Cable Television
With the help of Milton Shapp's innovation, cable television spread quickly throughout the country to remote and rural areas far from broadcast origination in cities.

Cable ILLEGAL in many places (UK, Australia..) until comparatively recently
Where Big Broadcasting Quasi-monopolies had politicians in their corner.

Actually, Britain had cable television many years ago. Redifusion used telephone wires and began service in 1951.

My home town had the one of the first experiments in pay-per-view movies via cable:

http://web.archive.org/web/201203201...nt.cfm?id=1319

EDIT: I should say, first-run pay-per-view movies. Like while they were still in theaters.

EDIT 2: And not pay-per-view, subscription. I'm getting all sorts of things wrong today, haha.

Cable TV would still be pretty cool if it was truly an "antenna extension" system, such as to people in hilly areas or in buildings where they cannot install good antennas with views to the stations. Instead, we get the horribly overpriced, way-excessive junk available today.

True, but not permitted to add extra channels as Walson was.
Decades of political turmoil lay ahead as Politicians fought to protect
(six figure)(now 7 figure) BBC jobs (for their friends) and the meager offering
of the Govt assigned BBC "competitor" ITV

The town I grew up in (Keene, NH) is in a valley surrounded by hills and mountains that pretty much blocked all TV signals of which almost none were local. We had at the time, early 70's, 2 localish stations, 1 was a repeater of NH public tv and was pretty low power and the other was WRLP 32 which was a repeat of WWLP 22 from Springfield, MA. Keene had cable tv going back to the early 60's because of the lack of receivable OTA signals. With cable which consisted of only channels 2-13 we got all the major network stations from Boston, CBS from Hartford, CT, NBC from Springfield, MA and Another CBS later ABC from Albany, NY. Plus we got a couple independents from Boston and Worcester, MA. We had this 12 channel system until the mid 80's when they finally rebuilt and modernized the system.

There was similar pressure from broadcasters in the U.S.

Until the mid 70s cable systems were not allowed to import any new programming (at that time independent TV stations) into their area. Therefore cable was only viable in areas with bad over the air reception.

In around 1974 the rules were relaxed somewhat and some independent stations could be imported. Of course the launching of satellites and distribution of HBO and cable programming by satellite changed all that.

I found a 1949 ad for "free coaxial cable rental" included with purchase of a new Admiral TV in Wilkes-Barre, another of those populous communities deep in a valley between the only cities with TV stations pre-1952 (Philadelphia and Binghampton NY).

If you look at today's coverage of what was then a DuMont channel WFIL-TV http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...&q=call%3dwpvi
its 70 mile contour hits all the ridge peaks in the area where cable started, north of I-81.
WPVI-6 and WPHL-17 are the only Philly stations on thier originally-assigned frequencies.

Unfortunately, the NYC stations did not cover Eastern PA much beyond Allentown and Phila, though they seem close enough.
It was super to get the three independents 5, 9, 11 from NYC and all of Philadelphia's ON CABLE when I lived in Allentown in the early 80's.
We had a second set, an RCA CTC11 in the bedroom, getting all those channels on the VHF dial ;-)

Service Electric Cable is still in business and was one of the first in the area to switch to fiber-optic.

Service Electric was famous for having probably the longest cascade of trunk amplifiers of any system in the country (96 if I remember correctly). Reliability at the end of the line was terrible.

No wonder the went to fiber optics as soon as they could.

We in the ny nj area had another option as far as pay tv movies......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wometco_Home_Theater

A few of us in BOCES tv repair decoded the signals for fun and free dirty movies late at night....

In St. Louis in the early 80's one of the independent tv stations (KDNL channel 30) had over the air pay movies. I think it was called Preview and they scrambled the broadcast signal and you had to rent a descrambler. It started at 7pm every night. They would often leave it unscrambled for the first few minutes of a movie, I think intentionally as a teaser.

The idea was there were so many rural areas around here that didn't have cable that there would be a market for it. It apparently didn't work as planned because it only lasted 2-3 years. I'm sure the stations ratings fell through the floor.

Our town got cable in '82. I remember several channels became something else at night. I know Nickelodeon was one of them. I don't know if that was the local cable that did that or if it was national.

Wometco use to leave it unscrambled until after the credits ended, then the sound had a guy telling people to call to get a subscription, the actual sound for the movie came out of the set top box, it was the encoded stereo sound's other channel.... They were the first to use over the air tv stereo for tv when tv's actually did not have stereo.... When you watched the movie, you turned off your tv sound.

Scrambling the picture was just flipping the sync upside down..... Instead of black bars on a un-synced picture, you saw white bars as the picture rolled right, left, up and down....

Holy cow! I found a youtube video of KDNL and Preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUbaBNOj-2A

And I missed out on Grover Washington Jr. and Black Emanuelle!

and for maybe a year or two, it became a kind of underground music video channel U68.

SuperTV
 

Growing up we had Super TV :


Super TV expanded into the Baltimore area in July 1982 on channel 54 WNUV. Unlike other pay TV channels, Super TV only broadcast from 7:00 pm to 1:00 am Monday-Friday and 3:00 pm to 1:00 am weekends throughout its entire run and never went 24-hour.
Subscribers received a 12 inch by 12 inch brown decoder box and a dedicated UHF antenna which was installed on the roof or on a balcony and aimed at the station's transmitter. When attached to a television, the box would filter in the Super TV movie channel. In the evening, subscribers could view a host of movies that were scheduled to play at that time.

That womeco thing originaly you could listen to the movie but the image was scrambled , i remember we had the guy come out to install but due to where we were it couldn't be done because the strong channel had too many ghosts and the other channel too weak.
there was another that in the 80's abc in ny ws testing at like 3am , it was a weird negative distorted image and the sound was jumbled , almost sounded like a skipping cd or something , this seemed to never get off the ground.

mike

That was probably Tele-First (maybe spelled Tele1st). It existed in Chicago for a short time as well. The idea was to record the scrambled movies on your VCR and watch them (with the descrambler box) at any time you wanted to. Sony made the boxes; I saw one on Ebay a number of years ago. It did not last long.

Philadelphia had this on WGBS 57 in the mid 80s. The supplied antenna was a 24" boom/single-channel yagi OK for the metro area but not out the 50 miles via wooded hills. Super TV expanded local coverage by also using WTVE-51, an independent channel started in Reading 1980, allowing that little antenna to work locally.

IIRC, there was a 15 khz sinewave added to the video, synchronized to invert the sync pulse as Mr Squirrel says.
Also thanks for the missing piece of this puzzle by pointing out this early application of MTS, jogging my memory.
In order to de-scramble, you had to "extract" this pulse from the sound subcarrier, invert it and add it back to the video.
The decoder box looked very homebrew IIRC

In Omaha NE, before cable came to this city, there was a line of sight (probably microwave band) link from a tall building near downtown, (the masonic manor), to a special antenna that was mounted on the subscribers roof or building that allowed viewers to watch a few premium channels using a set top box. I forget what the company was called. I remember repairing a few TV sets of customers that had subscribed to it, and I was amazed that they could actually watch R rated movies right on their TV. Of course it disappeared when cable came in.

I saw similar antennas around Cleveland in the early 90s

Ah yes, sinewave scrambling. You filtered out the 15.734 kHz sinewave from the video itself, inverted it, and combined it with the original video to get a watchable picture. The sound was on a 15 kHz subcarrier on the audio channel, but I don't think you needed that subcarrier for the video (well, you did not with OnTV descramblers, anyway, if I remember right). An LM565 chip and a few other components demodulated the sound for you.

Those services were called MDS (multipoint distribution system) or MMDS (multichannel multipoint...) if I remember right. There were still several of these active in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s (not movie channels but universities with programming, and a local channel called BayTV), but I have not tried to reinstall an antenna and try to see what is still up there in years. They are/were in the 2.1-2.5 GHz range, as you said.

I was going to mention-Ontv was a single channel broadcaster in chicago that came on at 7:00 pm and showed movies and sometimes a special event.A dedicated single frequency uhf antenna was installed and pointed at the broadcaster which fed a set-top descrambler box.The channel would make its transition from normal to scrambled programming every evening.People couldn't believe that they could get r-rated movies on a television set!I don't know if they ever made any money,because the signal was easily hacked and a lot of people could get the service for free.