Sports Plus Network

~ the last words ~

SportsChannel was Cablevision's regional sports operation, run from 1988 as a joint venture with NBC, and like every regional channel of the period it had an idle state. Rights deals covered games. Games do not last twenty-four hours. What filled the rest was Sports Plus Network, an automated service that put sports news and scores on the screen in NAPLPS, the graphics standard the videotex industry had settled on, and then advanced to the next page on a timer.

The comparison everyone reached for was teletext, and it is close but wrong in one respect that mattered. Teletext let you key in a page number. This did not. You watched the pages go by in the order the machine had decided, a few seconds each, with a ticker along the bottom and advertisements cutting in every few minutes. If the score you wanted had just gone past, you waited for the loop to come around again.

I have seen about nine minutes of this service, in two uploads somebody made from VHS tapes recorded in January 1990 and May 1991. That is the whole surviving record as far as I can find, along with a Wikipedia article so thin it hedges on whether the thing resembled teletext. No press release survives and no audience figure was ever published. It existed and it ran for roughly five years, and two people with VCRs are the reason anyone can confirm either fact.

~ the record ~

~ how a page arrived ~

NAPLPS sent drawing instructions rather than pixels, so a page assembled itself in front of you, a line at a time, then the blocks of color, in whatever order the encoder had queued them. Prodigy worked the same way on home computers and was mocked for the same slowness. On a television it read differently, less like a failing download and more like watching somebody else's screen being filled in.

The ticker scrolling along the bottom credited the operation to SportsChannel together with Tribune Media Services and the Associated Press, which is the only place that arrangement was ever stated. Early in 1991 the graphics were redrawn. Someone was still being paid to care about how it looked, two years before it stopped.

~ the funny part ~

Television sets appear in the background of television shows, and the production designer has to put something on them that will not cost money to clear. Sports Plus Network was perfect for that job: no faces and no recognizable footage, just scores assembling themselves in a corner of the frame. So it turns up on a monitor in the newsroom set of Murphy Brown, playing to an audience of millions who were not watching it, which is more exposure than the actual service ever got on actual cable.

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