Television...

Television (or better known as TV) has been a big part of the US culture for well over 60 years...

We have just passed the 60 year anniversary of the I Love Lucy show...

Shows before that may fade into memory...

I, believe it or not, was too young for the Howdy Doody show... However I do remember such shows as Sky King (already discussed), Beanie and Cecil (a kid with a propeller hat and a dragon type sidekick) along with The Thunderbirds (and other marionette variants)...

However the most dramatic change in my personal TV viewing came late one evening as my mother was watching a new show that was coming in on a UHF translator channel on our main black and white TV... It was snowy and had an interesting story happening where a creature was on the show unmoving yet fading in and out (even more so than the snowy UHF fringe signal we has) which gave it its own transcending and eerie-ness that caused the Sci-Fi in me to get hooked and want ever more... The show was Star Trek...

Of course this was all on the UHF translator channels (the ones number 14 thru 83) with the only television station in the town of Durango, Colorado being KREZ part of the XYZ television network... (An interesting side note how some names were assigned vanity letterings by the FCC... KREX - for Rex Howell in Grand Junction, with KREY Montrose and KREZ - Durango...) which had programming at the stations choices from all three major competing networks ABC, CBS and NBC... This caused time shifting and changes to when shows that competed were moved to other times that did not have much programming...

Then came along CABLE TV...

Oh what changes this caused... of course we had moved to New Mexico by then... and my dad had a different job and a company car... so he decided to splurge on Cable TV... with channels from Los Angeles, California... and to go along with this we even ended up with a Color TV... wow... the Olympics in 1972 were amazing in color compared to black and white... of course the snow was still white...

Then came PAY Channels on Cable TV... HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel... along with good commercial free channels with older movies American Movie Classis (which evolved into AMC and then has commercials all thru the movie) and Turner Classic movies ... which are still commercial free...

And of course MTV - Music on Television... wow... the first Video was one called Video Killed the Radio Star... of course now MTV rarely plays Music Videos and Sirius Satellite Radio has come back strong with the same Jockeys that started out with MTV now being on Sirius channel 8 for Big 80's... but lets get back on track to TV...

Satellite TV... the big dish era... 6, 8 10, and even 12 foot dishes for Home Reception of TV off of satellite... originally for the distribution of the signal to the cable Company head end (main reception and distribution point for the cable TV companies) locations these were non-encrypted and capable of being received by anyone who wanted to put up a dish and point it at the various satellites to being in the same programming that the Cable Company wanted to charge for... it was determined (and fought for in court) that anything that came into your backyard (that you did not have to decrypt) was free for your watching... the few systems that were initially sold had no bearing on the market until the more complex however easier to use systems came about... Since the satellites were in "Geostationary Orbits" as predicted and written about by Aurthur C. Clarke (famous Sci-Fi writer) this meant that they would be in the same position rotating in orbit around the earth at the same speed as the earth rotated. This allowed them to be able to be found in the sky to allow reception and with the Polar Mount for the ground based dish, the dish would be able to move thru the arc where all of the satellites were located without getting out of alignment... All one had to do then was to correctly align the dish with the arc and when it moved from east to west it would be able to receive signals from each and every satellite in the arc... One satellite in particular (the name fails me now and is not listed as it would have been replaced years ago) had on transponder 1 (transponder is the word for channel on the satellite) had a religious program with a gentleman with a "pork-pie" hat on close-up view reading from the bible directly into the camera. This I used to find the initial alignment for the dishes that I installed... and from there  I was able to tweak in the arc...

Then came Videocypher... an encryption program where IF you purchased the de-cryption box and paid on a per channel basis you could receive the channels that now were encrypted (the HBO and Showtime Channels etc...) that not only slowed the growing home market but was aimed to stem the entrepreneurial types that were gathering the channels for free and starting their own mini- CATV (cable TV) or MATV (master antenna TV) systems and charging the end user for services that they had not paid for themselves... This system was based somewhat on honesty and reported counts of subscribers which still might have not been as accurate as it could have been... of course like anything computer related that has since changed and is corrected...

There was a scam (and I am sure there are others) where you could purchase a unlocked VideoCypher box that would give you all of the channels that you wanted... It of course worked... curiously it also died after the 3 month warranty ran out... It was later discovered that the box that was sold (from out of the USA) was a box that was activated or "turned on" for 3 months and sold to the consumer at a premium of more that the combined price of the activations and the original cost of the box itself... Caveat emptor (buyer beware...)...

Then we come to DBS - Direct Broadcast Satellite... Dish Network and Direct TV (the two main versions left after all the swallowing up of smaller ones) which I shall continue in the next installment...