Sneak Prevue

~ the obit ~

Paying for one film, tonight, through the television was never a thing you could do in Turkey. Encrypted channels existed and you bought a decoder for them, but the decoder unlocked the whole channel or none of it, and there was no per-title transaction anywhere in the chain. If you wanted a specific film on a specific evening you walked to the video shop. So an entire American cable genre, the channel that exists to sell you the film in the next room, has no local equivalent I can compare it to.

Sneak Prevue was that channel. United Video Satellite Group spun it off from Prevue Channel in 1991 as a dedicated barker, a channel whose only content is advertising for other content on the same system. It showed what was starting on pay-per-view in the next thirty minutes, what was coming later in the week, the price of each, and the number to call. Between the listings it played trailers, at length, which is why people stopped on it.

That is the part worth remembering. A generation of American kids watched film trailers on a loop on Sneak Prevue with no intention of ordering anything, the same way people later left a trailer channel open on YouTube. The channel was free, the films were not, and the gap between those two facts was the entire viewing experience.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

Each cable headend ran its own copy of the channel. A laserdisc player held the trailers while an Amiga 2000 next to it generated the graphics and the schedule overlay, and a satellite data feed kept both machines in step with what that particular system was actually selling. The result was local. Your operator's logo went on the screen next to your prices, assembled on site by hardware nobody visited, and when the countdown clock rolled over to the next title it was your headend doing the arithmetic.

Laserdisc is the choice that dates it hardest. In 1991 there was no practical way to store a rotating set of two-minute video clips with random access and broadcast-acceptable quality except an optical disc the size of a dinner plate, so somebody had to physically ship discs to every cable system on the network. The trailers changed when the mail arrived.

~ the quiet end ~

Prevue Channel became TV Guide Channel on 1 February 1999 and Sneak Prevue kept its own name and format through the rebrand, then passed with the rest of the group into Gemstar-TV Guide International. It outlived its parent's identity by three years and then stopped mattering for a straightforward reason: In Demand and the individual cable operators started running their own promo channels, and a barker channel is not a thing anyone needs two of.

In April 2002 it ceased operations without an announcement. The pay-per-view listings and the ordering information moved into the scrolling grid on TV Guide Channel, which is the same place they had come from originally. Nobody wrote about it at the time. The people who noticed were the ones who tuned to a channel number out of habit and found something else there, which is how most of these actually end.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »