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Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

D

dgendvil

Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Yeah, while were on the subject of WGN & TBS (which for years was WTBS), which always been America's superstations, I like to if you had gotten WWOR & WPIX outside New York, KTLA outside Los Angeles, along with others like WSBK (Boston), KTVT (Dallas), KWGN (Denver) & sometimes KTVU (San Francisco) on your cable systems from across the country & beyond throughout the years? What do you think about it?
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Back in the 70's and early 80's I knew of a few cable systems in the Washington DC area ( Fairfax County ) that offered then WYAH-TV 27 out of Norfolk/Portsmouth ( the old Washington Star paper offered WYAH listings at the time ) meanwhile Baltimore's WBFF channel 45 was available on some systems well into central Virginia. However neither WYAH and WBFF are really considered "superstations" but on our system in the 80s..it was just WTBS for us...and WBFF.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Here in New Britain, CT near Hartford, we once had WSBK, WWOR and WPIX. Naturally we had WTBS, but never had WGN at all. Went I was in Washington DC for the weekend with my brother in August of 1989, the hotel's cable (the Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA) had WWOR and WTBS. They also had the big three from Baltimore on the lineup then too (WMAR, WBAL and WJZ).
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Cablevision of Southern Illinois began carrying WWOR sometime in the 80s and continued carrying it well into the mid/late 90s. What made it interesting (to me anyway) was WWOR's meteorologist at the time, the great Lloyd Lindsay Young, had worked in Evansville, Indiana (the local market to my hometown) in the late-70s/early-80s.

Speaking of, I remember Evansville cable (though I don't quite remember the name of the company that owned the franchise then) carried WPIX for only a short time in the late-80s. I vaguely remember catching the tail end of the final edition of WPIX's 7:30 newscast while at my dad's.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

WDRB Louisville had extensive cable coverage in Kentucky, about 100 miles around Louisville. WXIX Cincinnati had coverage in Ohio, Kentucky and into West Virginia. WTTV Bloomington was carried across Indiana and parts of Kentucky.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Adelphia Cable - Petersburg/Dinwiddie, VA had WGN, WTBS & WWOR.

If I remember correctly, from 1989 until 2001, WGN was on channel 16, WWOR was on channel 8, and I know for a fact that WTBS was on channel 18 (TNT was on channel 6, TCM was on 36, which we didn't get until appx. 1998.)

I really enjoyed WWOR because I was able to watch reruns of "The Love Boat," and their news. Then, I would be able to watch WGN's news.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Memphis Cablevision carried WOR back in the 80's. I used to get a kick out of their weatherman Lloyd Lindsay Young. I dropped cable for C band satellite in the late 80's so don't recall how long WOR was carried.

What was the anchorwoman's name on WOR news back in the 80's? She was a cutie.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

While US Cable Lake County Indiana was around, they carried WOR & later when they added the additional W to their call letters. By 1996 or 1997, WWOR was dropped from the cable lineup. Of course, it was the superstation, and not the WWOR that NYC area people saw. Superstation TBS seems to be well known that I believe they're on all cable systems. I could be wrong on that. Those have been the only 2 that were carried on my local cable systems. Since I'm in WGN's viewing area, WGN America isn't available on cable (local WGN is on cable though). I would have to get DirecTV or Dish Network to get WGN America.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

The Los Angeles Times old cable systems (Times-Mirror Cable TV and successor Dimension Cable) carried WWOR
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

In the seventies and eighties, there were a lot of regionally distributed stations.

For example, KSTW/11 from Tacoma/Seattle was distributed via microwave links to cable systems across the state of Washington, as far east as Pullman and Spokane. But from Pullman, if you went eight miles further east into Moscow, ID, the cable system didn't have KSTW, but instead carried WTBS.

On the western side of the state, KPTV/12 from Portland, OR was on some Tacoma area cable systems, and CBUT/2 from Vancouver, BC was seen throughout the Seattle/Tacoma area.

In Texas, the most prominent superstation was KTVT/11 from Fort Worth/Dallas, but KXTX/39 from Dallas was also carried rather widely.

Importing independent TV stations from adjacent markets was really the way that cable TV was able to break into most medium sized markets, back in the days when most of these areas only have affiliates of the Big 3. Needless to say, being able to offer multiple independent stations was a big plus for the cable systems that were able to do so...which is why some of the second tier independents (like KXTX) ended up getting regional distribution.

Since most of what was once offered on those independent stations has migrated over to cable networks, it's now a pretty much obsolete business model...but without those independent stations to import, cable would never have gotten big enough to be able to pull that programming over to cable networks.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

That reminds me that KWGN was carried in Pocatello, ID in the mid 70s
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Unfortunately, these faraway feats won't happen again... unless the rules change.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

We didn't get WGN until the spring of 2001, but for years we received TBS and WWOR through what is now Time Warner Cable. On the latter channel I remember New York at Night with Clint Holmes every weekday, different celebrities hosting the New York segments of the Jerry Lewis Telethon, 9 Broadcast Plaza, Steampipe Alley with Mario Cantone every Sunday morning and the station's news team of Rolland Smith, Lloyd Lindsay Young and Russ Salzberg. This was all before they did away with all of the local programming and switched to UPN. Ah, for the good old days....
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for ye

ercjncpr said:
That reminds me that KWGN was carried in Pocatello, ID in the mid 70s
Click to expand...

KWGN was carried on cable systems in Salt Lake City, Sandy, Ogden and Utah County, Utah for many years....basically through the early 1990s.

Another station with very wide regional carriage was WSBK, Boston's TV-38 which was carried on cable systems in upstate New York and throughout all of New England until the advent of UPN during the mid to late 1990s (it actually started in '95 IIRC). Seems to me that the one-two punch of the net-lets of (UPN and the WB) and the 1996 Syndex rules sounded the final death knell for most of the superstations. At this point, they had to be blacked-out more than 50% of the time in favor of in-market signals and it no longer made sense for cable systems to offer these channels to all but the most outlying of areas.

Interestingly, in Canada, where there are fewer such rules, most cable systems have a very healthy dose of U.S superstations and out of network signals. Spend a little time up there and you'll have a great example of what happens when our government passes laws to "help" consumers as they did with cable in 1996.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for ye

Because WSBK ran so many Boston Red Sox and Bruins games (and I guess some Celtics games too?) the station got carried on plenty of cable systems in the Northeast. When I lived in the Albany area, WSBK, WPIX and WWOR all ran on my local cable system. A friend of mine in the Syracuse area also got all these Northeast superstations. Ｉthink he also got WNEW-TV 5 NYC (later Fox 5 WNYW).

And when I was on vacation in the Burlington VT area, that system also carried WSBK and WPIX but for some reason, not WWOR. I guess the Red Sox and Yankees were the big draw, but not so much the Mets, which aired on WWOR. That cable system also carried CBFT 2 (Radio-Canada), CBMT 6 (CBC), CFCF-TV 12 (CTV) from Montreal and CJOH 8 (CTV) from Cornwall-Ottawa.



Gregg
[email protected]
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

The cable system in Knoxville carried WWOR in the late '70's and early '80's but by the time cable came out to the part of town I grew up, Fall 1982, WWOR had already been dropped. Intermedia in Nashville also carried WWOR but had dropped prior to me moving to Nashville in the mid '80's.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

I remember about 25 years ago or so, when Cablevision on New York carried not only WSBK/Boston on Channel 20, but Scranton PBS affiliate WVIA on Channel 44. At the time, they actually aired reruns of "All In The Family" and others. Also, for years, the system carried NJN (New Jersey Network PBS) but even though WNJM/Montclair could be received in the area, I guess it wasn't considered "must carry" so that was gone.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Time Warner's Milwaukee system (then Warner Cable in the 80s) had TBS, WGN, and WWOR on their system. If I remember correctly...WGN was (and still is) on channel 9, WWOR on 16, and TBS on 17 (now on 3). WVTV (Channel 18) itself was more or less a regional superstation, seen throughout Wisconsin.

Prior to my family moving back to Illinois from Los Angeles in '87, many of the cable systems in southern Los Angeles County usually had all three superstations, but when we came back a year later, I noticed that there only maybe three or four systems in all of Los Angeles County (reflecting back to cable lineup listings in the L.A. Times and Daily News) that carried the three. I think there was a rule where you had to choose two of three (usually it was TBS and WGN, or TBS and WWOR), and if the cable system carried a third superstation, they had to pay some sort of an extra fee. Of course, over the years many of those systems that had WWOR eventually replaced it with WGN.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Back around '81 or '82 I recall Rogers Cable in San Antonio carried WOR that I was able to see at my grandparents house. (I lived out in the sticks in rural Texas and didn't have cable, was only able to see it when visiting my grandparents in SA). Not sure if they also carried WGN at that time, if they did I do not remember it.
I just remember seeing news and commercials from NYC at that time (I was about 12 yrs old) and thought it was so cool.
 
Re: Besides WGN & WTBS, which cable systems did carry WWOR, WPIX & others for years?

Scotpfv said:
Back around '81 or '82 I recall Rogers Cable in San Antonio carried WOR that I was able to see at my grandparents house.
Click to expand...

Was this the same Rogers Cable as the one in Canada?
 
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