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Prevue Guide

S

ssetta

I'm sure many of you remember Prevue Guide, which is basically the old TV Guide Channel. I remember it had a black background with white listings scrolling, and I remember it was a different color each time it went around, and it had this cheesy synthesizer music playing in the background. Does anyone know exactly when Prevue Guide first started, and/or when they started and stopped using that music?
 
ssetta said:
I'm sure many of you remember Prevue Guide, which is basically the old TV Guide Channel. I remember it had a black background with white listings scrolling, and I remember it was a different color each time it went around, and it had this cheesy synthesizer music playing in the background. Does anyone know exactly when Prevue Guide first started, and/or when they started and stopped using that music?
Click to expand...

It started out in the late 80's as the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). There was no video, just listings, and the audio would be provided by a local radio station. In 1991 or so, the name was changed to Prevue Guide, and video previews were added. The synthisized music was played during times local ad slides appeared (In some areas, full video ads from the cable companies ad insertion system were shown instead), or when there were technical issues.

In 1993, it became the Prevue Channel, and the listings changed to white and yellow over dark blue. The music (which to this day is still stuck in my head - I was 10 or so at the time) changed. In 1997, the Prevue Channel logo changed, and the music changed, this time there were several different songs and they were rotated out on a regular basis.

In 1999, it became the TV Guide Channel. Synthisized music stopped when the hardware at the all of the cable headends was upgraded from Amiga to PC based (About 2000). Local video ad insertion continues today, but no music or static slides.
 
Here in Starkville, MS, Northland cable has their own tv listing channel (their website says zaptoit express) instead of TVGuide channel. They do local static ad inserts at the top with oldies music (pumped in - badly, as it's not in stereo and only the left/background channel is linked - from the DMX music service they offer).

What makes its more ridiculous is that they also have a local advertisement channel as well. Don't know why they need both as they pretty much both run the same slides.
 
...somewhere around here I have Prevue's promo batch for a month in (I think) 1997 (one of the shows being plugged was a Spice Girls concert pay-per-view from Athens). They distributed their promos to individual cable systems on *laserdisc* and each system transferred the ones customised to their company (TimeWarner, TCI, Bresnan, Cablevision, Charter, etcetera) onto tape (most likely VHS) for local airing -- that's why the top half of the screen always looked poorer than the bottom half (with the computer-generated program listings) did...
 
jal41 said:
It started out in the late 80's as the Electronic Program Guide (EPG). There was no video, just listings, and the audio would be provided by a local radio station. In 1991 or so, the name was changed to Prevue Guide, and video previews were added. The synthisized music was played during times local ad slides appeared (In some areas, full video ads from the cable companies ad insertion system were shown instead), or when there were technical issues.

In 1993, it became the Prevue Channel, and the listings changed to white and yellow over dark blue. The music (which to this day is still stuck in my head - I was 10 or so at the time) changed. In 1997, the Prevue Channel logo changed, and the music changed, this time there were several different songs and they were rotated out on a regular basis.

In 1999, it became the TV Guide Channel. Synthisized music stopped when the hardware at the all of the cable headends was upgraded from Amiga to PC based (About 2000). Local video ad insertion continues today, but no music or static slides.
Click to expand...

On some cable systems, EPG/Prevue Guide listings were accompanied by video previews of upcoming shows with the audio, either from the ads or from a radio service. The cable company where I lived in the L.A. area, the audio on Prevue Guide/Channel was from the Cable Radio Network. Then some years later, they moved CRN to its own channel, Prevue Guide/Channel carried the video previews with its own audio intact. There used to be a show on CRN where people called-in and asked questions about cable TV, and I remembered one of the hosts saying that the video previews were inserts were provided by your cable company, while the programming listings were done by United Video in Tulsa (before they were bought by TV Guide--thus Prevue becoming the TV Guide Channel), the same people who distributed the Tribune superstations via satellite.
 
There are some clips of EPG available on YouTube from the Chicago area, and it's the audio from Hot 102.3. But I think that depended on the area. We first got cable in 1989, and it was already called Prevue Guide, IIRC. And I have to tell you, that because I have autism, I used to watch it all the time, because it had a clock with moving seconds. I used to go to this special school for people with disabilities, and they had a home teacher come to the house for awhile. She was here while we got cable installed, and the Prevue Guide was the first thing I found. And both my mother and the teacher figured out that I liked it because of the clock. A lot of autistic people like to watch changing numbers. But the teacher said that this is not okay. So, I wasn't usually allowed to watch it. Did any of your parents feel that way?
 
If you click on the one where it crashes and has the red box at the bottom, you can hear the entire piece of music.
 
Yeah, I remember Prevue Guide and the synthesizer music. Anybody know the name of the music. I also remember music being played in the background during Prevue Tonight. I also remember a funny prmo with a person calling for the Prevue Guide logo to come forth and it slowly came to him and hit him and he fell and you can hear sound effects like he fell in a trash can or something. I also remember when it was just Electronic Program Guide with the guide covering the whole screen. I don't remember background music from a radio station during that time. That's interesting.
 
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