Prevue Channel

~ the last words ~

United Video Satellite Group started it in 1981 out of Tulsa, and the whole idea was a television channel whose content was the other channels. The bottom of the screen scrolled through what was on tonight, half an hour at a time, in a grid you could not scroll yourself. The top half ran promos for shows and ads for local car dealers. Underneath everything sat a loop of library synthesizer music that nobody chose and everybody remembers. It was called the Electronic Program Guide until 1988, then Prevue Guide, then Prevue Channel from 1993.

The part that makes it worth a grave is where the picture came from. It was not produced in one building and sent out finished. Every cable system generated its own version locally, off a computer sitting in the headend, fed by a low speed data stream from Tulsa carrying that town's listings. Early generations ran on Apple II and Atari hardware. By the late eighties it was Commodore Amigas with genlock cards, which is why tens of millions of Americans were staring at Amiga output every day without ever hearing the word. Around forty million households could reach the channel by 1995.

At midnight on 1 February 1999 the Prevue name went away. United Video had bought TV Guide magazine from News Corporation and wanted that brand on television, so the channel became TV Guide Channel. Through December of that year the Amigas were pulled out for Windows NT machines and the navy blue grid turned yellow. The grid survived for another fifteen years as a shrinking strip at the bottom of an increasingly ordinary entertainment channel, and the carriage agreements that obliged it to be there ran out in June 2014. The channel became Pop in January 2015.

Cable in Turkey arrived in the nineties and it did not carry anything like this. What reaches me is the machine, not the channel. The Amiga was a demo and games computer where I grew up, something you argued about against the Atari ST, and the idea that American cable infrastructure quietly ran on racks of them until 1999 is the kind of fact that rearranges a piece of hardware in your head.

~ the record ~

~ the machine ~

Because each headend ran its own box, each box could crash on its own. That is how a generation of American cable subscribers learned what a Guru Meditation looks like. The Amiga's crash screen went out over the air, a red bordered box with a hexadecimal error number in it, sitting where the listings had been until somebody at the cable company noticed and power cycled the thing. Sometimes it sat there for a whole evening.

The other failure mode was funnier and more common. The data feed drove the ad text as well as the listings, so a garbled stream would leave the promo area displaying raw control codes or the wrong town's advertising. None of it was ever meant to be watched closely. It was a barker channel, background for a room where somebody was deciding what to put on, and the low stakes are exactly why the crashes felt like getting a look behind something.

~ the day it died ~

There was no shutdown and no announcement to viewers. The channel simply had a different name after midnight on 1 February 1999, and the transition happened in stages after that: new graphics first, then new hardware in December, and eventually real programming in the top half where the promos had been. By 2009 a third of carrying systems had dropped the grid entirely, and by late 2011 three quarters had.

~ the long tail ~

Prevue has one of the more serious fan archives on the web. There is a wiki devoted to the software builds and the music cues, run by people reconstructing what a specific cable system's grid looked like in a specific year. Emulator projects have gone as far as rebuilding the scroll from the original Amiga code paths so it can run on a modern machine and be wrong in the same ways.

It is a strange thing to preserve, since nobody ever sat down to watch it on purpose. But that is also why it works as memory. Nobody has a favorite episode. Everybody who had cable in the United States between 1988 and 1999 has the same forty seconds of it, waiting for the grid to come back around to the channels they actually got.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »