they wouldn't have been asking for the McJordan in North Dakota without WGNA
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Cable systems that didnt carry popular channels
- Thread starter installLSC
- Start date
Well, here's another out of market WNBC oddity:
In the early 2000s, Duo County Cable TV Columbia KY, (Adair county Louisville DMA) carried WNBC on it's OTA channel on cable (4).
No in market WAVE, or Lexingtons WLEX, BUT, they had WLKY and WKYT for CBS, WHAS, WBKO and WTVQ for ABC and WDRB and WDKY for FOX.
One summer back then, I was installing new kitchen equipment at Adair County HS, while school was out. I took my lunch in the cafeteria, so I turned on one of the wall mounted TVs while I ate lunch and I remember the "NBC America" ID. This was maybe 2001..
Duo County eventually added WLEX and WAVE for NBC, however at the end of last year, they have discontinued linear cable TV service and exists solely as an internet provider under the name "Duo County Broadband"
Telecable in Lexington had the "Network Wildcard Channel". (Their name)
It resided on cable channel 18.
It received Louisville channels WAVE, WHAS, and WLKY as well as WLWT, WCPO and WKRC in Cincinnati for restoration of pre-empted network shows.
Reception was almost local grade from what I remember. (I have shows taped from that channel)
There was no rhyme or reason for which channels were activated, probably someone at the Palumbo Dr headend, just looked in the TV guide and picked one of those available. I don't know if it was a programmable or a manually operated setup.
It was reliable *most* of the time but didn't work on a few occasions.
During idle times, it displayed a program guide showing when the pre-empted shows would air and the Reuters (sp?) news ticker and race results.
At that distance, they might have been able to claim that they couldn't get a stable OTA signal on WAVE or WLEX, but that wouldn't explain why they were able to carry other Louisville or Lexington stations. Sometimes, there can be problems with getting an individual station at a given location, the opposite of being in a "sweet spot" where a station will come in with unexpected reliability. Or Duo County might simply have thought it would be interesting to provide one station from New York City. I'm not clear to what extent must-carry and/or market exclusivity is required that far out on the edges of a DMA. (Satellite providers solve that problem by simply providing only in-market stations, with rare exceptions, throughout the length and breadth of the market.)
Adair County was nominally in the Louisville DMA, and according to this map is now in the Bowling Green DMA (it is kind of at the crossroads of the Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, and Nashville markets, BG would make the most sense especially given that they now have the four major networks), but at that time, unless it would have been BG, it's not really "local" to anyplace.
When I had Adelphia Communications in Kazoo they had WWOR was kinda surprised Adelphia didn't carry WKBD from Detroit as I dub it Michigan's Superstation, did get WNDU NBC & WSBT CBS out of South Bend they along with the locals other than WZZM. Suckvision oh, I mean Cablevision didn't add ESPN2 until spring of 99 had to pay extra for it I think it was only $2, my grandparents got History as Cablevision played favorites Portage got newer cable networks they had Cartoon Network in 96 Kazoo didn't get it until they started upgrades in the fall of 99 took until a year before the upgrades happened in my neighborhood in fall of 2000. Cablevision was sold to Charter Spectrum in fall of 2000 and started to get everyone on digital cable.
No VH1, E!, History in the lineup until the fall of 2000 didn't get FOX News until spring of 2001 when Charter changed everything around moving networks around funny thing with a cable box MTV was channel 57 without was channel 99 which with the changes that Charter did in spring of 2001 put MTV on channel 99 until the fall of 2007 moved it to channel 36 where it remains today.
No VH1, E!, History in the lineup until the fall of 2000 didn't get FOX News until spring of 2001 when Charter changed everything around moving networks around funny thing with a cable box MTV was channel 57 without was channel 99 which with the changes that Charter did in spring of 2001 put MTV on channel 99 until the fall of 2007 moved it to channel 36 where it remains today.
That's probably exactly what they did. Viewers probably wouldn't care whether it were a Louisville or Cincinnati station being inserted, as long as they could get the show they wanted to see.
It wouldn't happen often, but wonder what they did with wild-card channels when two local stations pre-empted the respective network offerings at the same time?
We had a local cable company here in mcgrath, alaska back in the 80s and 90s. i think they got the programming from dish network and distributed it on cable. we had 600-800 people back then. I'll have to see if anyone has an old cable tv line up from back in the day
Stupid question, were they allowed to do that?
Or were they so far out in the cut that nobody would care?
Many apartment buildings distribute signals straight from DirecTV to their residents. I imagine this would have been a similar arrangement?
Dish Network didn't even begin service in 1996, and I don't believe its footprint included Alaska at the beginning.
ok... i recall someone in passing told me the programming came off a commercially available service or so i thought.
ill find out more
Maybe Primestar or C-Band?
was a local channel bleeding in?
many hotels use direcTV dish
I encountered a similar setup (Dish Network) at a small, family-owned motel in the Upstate of South Carolina recently. I posted about it either here or on another forum, wondering why all of the channels were in analog, even though they had fairly nice HDTV receivers. It was evidently because converting the satellite feed to analog is fairly simple and economical, whereas delivering HDTV to every room would be a more involved endeavor.
It is a fairly small, no-frills motor hotel catering to budget-minded travelers and contract workers (yet very, very clean, safe, and comfortable), so basic television is all that would be expected. (They could probably get by with a decent MATV system and local channels, which would have no monthly subscription fee.)
That person was almost certainly talking about HITS.
HITS was (and still is) a separate company from the public DBS providers that launched in the early-mid 1990s (DSS/USSB aka DirecTV, Echostar aka DISH, Primestar, and Alphastar). But it operated/operates in much the same way, downlinking most popular cable networks from their traditional C/Ku-band feeds, which are scattered over dozens of satellites, followed by compressing them onto just one or two satellites. HITS was started to target small towns that lacked cable television given the expense of constructing traditional headends with dozens of dishes and isle after isle of racked IRDs. Not only could their multiplexes be received with just one multi-angle dish, but the MPEG-2 coding parameters and bitrates of each channel in their muxes were pre-shaped to be compatible with standard Scientific Atlanta and Motorola cable boxes' decoders, and to fit evenly into 6 MHz QAM-64 and QAM-256 muxes.
Essentially, it allowed a small cable system to be built whose headend was the equivalent of a mere hub in a traditional cable system's topography.
Last edited:
and also overpriced older Nintendo games by the hour
We had a local cable company do that back in the late '90s/early 2000s. Zampelli Electronics (it's now Zito Media). They did the same thing. Locals weren't available yet so we had DISH, but Zampelli for the locals. Whenever there was a rainstorm, Zampelli lost some of the cable channels that they had. I knew where that "satellite signal lost" screen was from.