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Has anyone here on this forum own a C-band dish? Tell your memories here!

I did not have a chance to have one,My mom would of killed me at the time.A house down the block still has theirs on the roof,since the 1980's,oh what year did HBO's feed got hacked in.also what was movie that got cut in?all I remember it was in the mid 1980's.
btw the 36 cable channel box.I had that, also a 22 channel box,plus a rotory cable box.I remember the channels use to fade out,then I push the 2 adjacent buttons then walla ,It works.
 
I enjoyed reading all this stuff, but what has this to do with classic tv, except for the minor references to RTV. Was there any feeds dedicated to old classic shows like Playhouse 90 and the like?
 
You could say the old Nostalgia Network would be what Michael describes..Also, I think "Classic" could describe anything we are nostalgic for, from TV shows to stations, as well as the way we watched TV "back in the day"..So this thread I think is very much appropriate to "Classic TV"
 
I remember looking at a somewhat visible screen with the text VIACOM WILD FEED. What other companies have their own wild feed? And do C-band dishes even exist anymore?
 
My grandfather got one of these dishes in 1996. I remember watching ABC coverage of a PGA tournament once on the dish and there were "black" areas of commercial breaks, which I assumed to be network breaks for local promos. Looked to me like a raw network feed.

As I recall, the service included several CBC stations including CBC North and CBMT Montreal, in addition to CBFT. I also remember seeing WUHF from Rochester on there.

In 1995, I was in a motel in Eastern Ontario with a TV hooked up to a big dish, and it received ATV from the Maritimes.
 
Iowan said:
I remember looking at a somewhat visible screen with the text VIACOM WILD FEED. What other companies have their own wild feed?
Click to expand...

I recalled Disney (as Buena Vista Television) and Warner Bros. transmitting their programs on a dedicated transponder -- they would simply show a test pattern and tone (with an occasional "left" and "right" uttered for stereo) if they had nothing to send. Fox would also use their network feeds to send syndicated programming, outside of network time.

Each network also had a special transponder for news feeds for their affiliates, always in the clear -- I recalled ABC and CBS each having at least one.
 
Iowan said:
And do C-band dishes even exist anymore?
Click to expand...

The most comprehensive listings I've found are HERE. Click on the Satellite and you will get the transponders and listings. Go to the home page and you will get satellites for the rest of the world.

(Caution: Click on the link only if you have A LOT of time to kill...)
 
azumanga said:
Iowan said:
I remember looking at a somewhat visible screen with the text VIACOM WILD FEED. What other companies have their own wild feed?
Click to expand...

I recalled Disney (as Buena Vista Television) and Warner Bros. transmitting their programs on a dedicated transponder -- they would simply show a test pattern and tone (with an occasional "left" and "right" uttered for stereo) if they had nothing to send. Fox would also use their network feeds to send syndicated programming, outside of network time.

Each network also had a special transponder for news feeds for their affiliates, always in the clear -- I recalled ABC and CBS each having at least one.
Click to expand...

ABC for many years, would time share one of their four Telstar 301 transponders (T302 on the West Coast) when the network was not active, for the News One service. ABC later established a dedicated transponder for News One. CBS did the same for their Newspath service.

NBC notably moved away from C-Band service to Ku-Band in the early 1980s when they launched their Skypath service. NBC maintained one dedicated C-Band feed on Satcom 1R for many years for East Coast viewers.

Warner Bros. inherited a Telstar 301 slot from Lorimar/Telepictures following their merger in the late 1980s. LT had previously subleased time from WOLD/Keystone. Disney obtained a slot of their own in the mid 1990s through an arrangement with Keystone, after using Compact Video transponders for a few years. Another syndicator of note to have a dedicated transponder was Group W's "TVSC", which occupied two slots on Westar 5 for several years before moving over to T301.
 
In the late 90s, after Telstar 301 crashed, there was Telstar 5. It wasn't as good as Telstar 301, but had some stuff, T5-9, T5-10 and T5-13 were Fox feeds/syndication. T5-21 and 22 were ABC feeds, scrambled usually, or a test pattern.

Also Galaxy 4 had lots of "wild card" stuff on it, CBS on G4-18, G4-19 and G4-20, Paramount on G4-22, CBS News feeds on G4-24, Buena Vista Television on G4-2, and 4MC on G4-5.

-crainbebo
 
Primetime 24 in the mid 90s would have to be these stations.

Spacenet 1, 06: WNBC New York
Spacenet 1, 10: WKRN Nashville
Spacenet 1, 24: WSEE Erie (before it was WRAL and on a completely different satellite)
Spacenet 4, 06: KNBC Los Angeles
Spacenet 4, 08: KOMO Seattle
Spacenet 4, 10: FoxNet national feed
Spacenet 4, 24: KPIX San Francisco

-crainbebo
 
Sometimes you would see previews of mini-series which presumably stations could record for sales presentations. I remember one which said that the music was not finalized. I wasn't quite sure about the feeds on individual series episodes before the network air date. My assumption was that was the production company feeding the show to New York for recording, but could be wrong.

We could get NBC's eastern and mountain feed in the clear. We couldn't get NBC's West Coast feed because it was on a "spot beam".
 
Having owned three BUDs over the years, I really miss just seaching the sky for whatever weirdness there was to be found.
A couple of notable instances were:

Once I found a clear feed of Mary Alice Williams doing news on CNN and the camera would stay on her after she had introed a story. The mike stayed live as well and this time inbetween segments, she seemed to be addressing lot of envelopes. During this same occurance, she leaned to one side and asked the camera operator if he was alright, because she said "you don't look so good"...

Another time I found clear backhaul video of CNN during the first Gulf War. I saw Charles Jaco("C.D." Jaco from his days with NBC Radio's 'The Source' news service) duck and cover when an explosion went off nearby him and Christiane Amanpour yelling at the TV crew to hurry up because something was blowing up or there was 'incoming' that she wanted to catch on camera.
 
My in-laws lived in the country and owned one in the late 80's. At the time nothing was being
scrambled except TBS. You got a scrambled snowy gray picture and an audio "barker channel"
which ran a looped sales pitch on what a wonderful thing it would be to subscribe to TBS.
I remember getting The Flintstones in French from Montreal and many sporting event feeds.
In particular I was fascinated by the raw feeds from network news broadcasts. I remember
getting an uplink from one side of a televised conversation that involved a very famous network
newscaster (he has since passed away, so I won't name him). After he asked a question and the
main feed obviously cut to a shot of the guest, you could watch him wheezing, twitching and
picking his nose until suddenly snapping back when cued to ask his next question! No wonder
the networks couldn't wait to scramble their uplinks!
 
January 15, 1986 will forever be known as the day that C-Band satellite changed forever.....the day HBO & Cinemax began full-time scrambling of their feeds with the Videocipher II system.
 
stdjsb25 said:
January 15, 1986 will forever be known as the day that C-Band satellite changed forever.....the day HBO & Cinemax began full-time scrambling of their feeds with the Videocipher II system.
Click to expand...

The VC II encryption engine was cracked almost as soon as it was put in place. It wasn't until the Digicipher-2 system arrived that 'civilian' end users were blocked. Now there are several major types of encryption engines being used by BUD as well as DTV and most are not available to the public.

I'll speculate that "the day that C-band satellite changed forever" was about ten years later than stated above.
 
Remember the Spacenet 3? Some superstations on that one in the 90s.

S3-03 was WSBK Boston.
S3-05 was KTVT Dallas in the early 90s, then Univision after KTVT went CBS.
S3-09 was WPIX New York.
S3-11 was CNN/Sports Illustrated in the late 90s.
S3-15 was KTLA Los Angeles
S3-16 was CNNfn when they started in late 95/early 96.
S3-19 was Fox Sports Detroit after 1997.
S3-20 was Gem Shopping Channel around late 90s.
S3-21 was Fox Sports World.
S3-24 was America One around 1998 or so.

-crainbebo
 
crainbebo said:
Remember the Spacenet 3? Some superstations on that one in the 90s.

S3-03 was WSBK Boston.
S3-05 was KTVT Dallas in the early 90s, then Univision after KTVT went CBS.
S3-09 was WPIX New York.
S3-11 was CNN/Sports Illustrated in the late 90s.
S3-15 was KTLA Los Angeles
S3-16 was CNNfn when they started in late 95/early 96.
S3-19 was Fox Sports Detroit after 1997.
S3-20 was Gem Shopping Channel around late 90s.
S3-21 was Fox Sports World.
S3-24 was America One around 1998 or so.

-crainbebo
Click to expand...

There were quite a few station groups up on the birds.....in the beginning, there was WTBS, and it was good. KTVU San Francisco came as a competitor for a while. Then came WGN, and it got better. Then came WOR/WWOR, and it got even better.

By the mid 1980s, WPIX had joined them....KTLA and WSBK came about 1987-88 or so.

Then in about 1986 or so, the Netlink Denver stations began their long reign on Satcom F1R/C1....KUSA, KMGH, KCNC, KRMA, KDVR and KWGN, plus at the time KUBD during KRMA's off hours, and something called KSPN. KSPN and KUBD went away, along with KDVR for a while. Netlink even ran a redundant feed on F1R for a while of WGN Chicago (same stuff that was on United Video's Galaxy 1 TR 3 feed). And who can forget the short move of the Denver stations to F2R?

Meanwhile....on Satcom F2R, came PrimeTime24. It was just three stations, WBBM, WXIA, and WABC, in the beginning.
 
The Galaxy 1 in the late 80s had LOTS of cable channels on it, like TNN and CNN. Anyone remeber the Galaxy 1?

-crainbebo
 
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