What's your cable / satellite provider history?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by PaulKTF, Sep 27, 2016.

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  1. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    How many cable and/or satellite providers have you had over the years? I've had...

    In the mid-80's (by 1985 at the latest) we had Jones Intercable as our first cable provider with one of these types of converter boxes:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I think that in the market I was living in it was replaced by (or bought by?) Paragon Cable, which eventually changed their cable service name to Century Cable.

    Paragon/Century was bought out by Time Warner around 1995. Time Warner Cable itself was acquired by Charter this year and while we're still on the Time Warner Cable system it will be switched over to Charter Spectrum at some point within the next 8 months or so.

    In the pre-Internet days I used to love paging through the Paragon/Century/Time Warner Cable cable guides every month, writing down what movies and shows I wanted to watch.
     
  2. agentalbert

    agentalbert Senior Member

    Location:
    San Antonio, TX
    Wow, I've never seen anything like that. We had some sort of cable when I was a kid (late 70's), as we had HBO, but I never remember having any sort of converter box. The TV's we had must have had a cable tuner and it just went straight into that. At least I think so. That was along time ago, but I remember exactly what the TV and VCR and the remotes all looked like, so if we'd had a cable box, I think I'd remember that too.
     
  3. MikeInFla

    MikeInFla Glad to be out of Florida

    Location:
    Kalamazoo, MI
    [​IMG]

    We had one of these back in the early 80's. The main thing I remember is cable was a "Christmas present" and we loved it. I remember endless showings on HBO of Flash Gordon, Laurel & Hardy's Babes In Toyland & Freddy The Freeloader's Christmas Dinner. We never changed cable service. Had the same company as long as I can remember until I got married and moved away but I believe they are now Charter.

    Moved to Florida in 2000 and had Knology which is now Wow! And no complaints here.... But I do miss that old school box that would change channels fast while trying to watch Cinemax scrambled with one finger on the channel changer sitting there the whole time thinking "hey that might have been a boob did you see that?!?" Then changing the channel as soon as an adult walked in.
     
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  4. Chris from Chicago

    Chris from Chicago Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes

    Yeah, I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen anything quite like that either. I remember getting cable in the late 70's or early 80's...but I don't recall seeing any box or attachment.

    And the picture in the old days was really pretty bad compared to what we have now. There's no ghosting anymore.
     
  5. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Had both of those early on, the slider and the button box (with a 3 position switch to choose A B or C.) For a very long time, TeleCable of Overland Park Kansas had a dual cable system, and the store I worked for stocked every TV with dual antenna inputs.
     
  6. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Oh man, I forgot about the A/B switcher cable boxes! Time Warner used those for awhile.
     
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  7. MikaelaArsenault

    MikaelaArsenault Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Hampshire
    In Massachusetts for the first year of my life, we had Time Warner Cable (I think). Moved to New Hampshire in 2000, we ended up getting Fairpoint Communications. We have had Comcast ever since my family switched to it from Fairpoint.
     
  8. PearlJamNoCode

    PearlJamNoCode Forum Resident

    Location:
    Philadelphia
    As a lifelong Philadelphia resident, it has always been Comcast. :realmad:
     
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  9. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    The knob on the slider box in the OP was "fine tuning" ... which would also be used in our decryption efforts in the eternal Quest For Boobage!
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2016
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  10. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Oh! "The Quest For Boobage" is my favorite Monty Python movie!

    :)
     
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  11. Myke

    Myke Trying Not To Spook The Horse

    Same since 2000. Wasn't that exciting ?
     
  12. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I've left behind cable and satellite, and watch everything via either a BluRay player or a Roku box. I've lost any patience with commercials.

    More exciting and interesting to me is ISPs. My first was the the first commercial ISP, The World in Boston. We had to call long distance from Kansas City to log in via a VT-100 emulator on an Amiga 1000. Later on ChiNet (the home of the first BBS) and then one of the 1000 customers of Sprint's ill-fated Ion system. They spent a reported million dollars per customer, and shut the system down just as they got it working well. I'm on Google Fiber now at my Kansas City apartment.

    Cable is so 20th century.
     
  13. It's not 57 channels and nothing's on.... It's more like 600.
     
  14. PHILLYQ

    PHILLYQ Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brooklyn NY
    I had Cablevision for 20 years(no choice) and I was glad to get rid of them. I have Verizon FIOS now and I like it a lot.
     
  15. Holy Diver

    Holy Diver Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    I think I've only had Charter.
     
  16. applebonkerz

    applebonkerz Senior Member

    Zero. I've never used any of that, an antenna serves us just fine.
     
  17. Silver Surfer

    Silver Surfer Love Is Understanding

    United Cable which became TCI Cablevision which was absorbed by the monolith Comcast which now sometimes/kind of/halfway goes by Xfinity. It hasn't been the same since the mid-90s; a slow, steady decline.
     
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  18. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    On my personal TV I switched from cable to antenna and I'm actually enjoying TV a lot more with the antenna than I did with the cable. There were so many channels I just wasn't watching on cable.
     
  19. applebonkerz

    applebonkerz Senior Member

    Between all the extra stations we get now with the digital change over -- oldies stations especially -- and finally adding Netflix to fill in when we can't find something good to check out of the library, how much more of our life do we really need to vegetate in front of the TV than that? :)
     
  20. charlie W

    charlie W EMA Level 10

    Location:
    Area Code 254
    I started out with CableVision and it gave us 4 premium channels(HBO 1 & 2, Showtime, Showcase). First thing I ever watched was an Muhammad Ali fight. CableVision became Time Warner Cable and stayed that way for many years. Now we're about 7 days into the transition to Spectrum and they re-aligned the channels on the standard/extended tier: some were dropped and others added. It's all very confused because they still run service ads for Time Warner Cable.
     
  21. stereoptic

    stereoptic Anaglyphic GORT Staff

    Location:
    NY
    I remember something about pushing two buttons in at the same time, and rotating the dial would sometimes unscramble Skinemax
     
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  22. Damien DiAngelo

    Damien DiAngelo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan, USA
    My family was the only one of all my friends in the neighborhood that had cable. We had cable & HBO back in 1979. Back then, in my town it was Fetzer cable. That became Cablevision. Cablevision became (or was bought out by) Charter. I remember that early on, we didn't have a cable box. Channels 2-13 were all we got. HBO was on channel 2, and you had to have a descrambler filter to watch it.
    We didn't have a choice for cable providers for a long while.
    Back in 2009, I switched to U-verse. I like it a lot, but it is very expensive. I think I'm going to be cutting the cord soon. We had over 600 channels. I think the whole family watched maybe 15 of them on a regular basis. We cut our plan way back to the 200 channel plan. Of course quite a few of the channels we watched are not part of this channel tier. So I think all of the TV channels are going away soon in my house.
     
  23. Thievius

    Thievius Blue Oyster Cult-ist

    Location:
    Syracuse, NY
    About a billion different services over the years. I've since learned that they're all 99.9% filler/crap and anything I'd ever want to watch is available on the net, so I've had no use for any of them in over a decade.
     
  24. keef00

    keef00 Senior Member

    In the early 80s, we actually moved once specifically to a location where we could get cable. In those days when the choices were OTA, local cable or a radio-telescope-size dish, I stuck with cable. When we moved to our present home in 1992, we had cable from a company that was later bought by Charter - don't remember the name. The service was so bad that I bought a DirecTV dish the very first day they were available in 1994. Kept that until late 2014, when I got tired of the separate TV, phone and internet bills and went to a Charter package for all three. I've been semi-satisfied with the service, and less so with the price after the introductory special expired. Now we watch so much via Roku/Netflix, I really need to consider dropping the cable altogether.
     
  25. Doug Sclar

    Doug Sclar Forum Legend

    Location:
    The OC
    We first got cable back when I was in San Diego in the early 70s. San Diego had one of the largest cable companies in the country mainly because we were far enough from LA that you needed a 40' antenna to get it, but close enough that there was a large demand for those services. In those days there were no 'cable' channels but cable was used to relay off air broadcasts in an effort to give better reception to it's subscribers.

    Mainly, I wasn't watching too much TV in those days but without cable there was not a whole lot of TV in San Diego. There were also lots of canyons and even getting good reception from the local channels was iffy for many locals. Even FM radio was difficult especially when driving.

    Next time I got cable was in 1981, shortly after I first heard about the superstations. My goal was to give me more baseball games. I was a huge Padre fan, living in OC, and I had a 40' antenna so I could get the SD channels, but even that was iffy at times. By adding the NY, Atlanta, and Chicago susperstations I was able to see a lot more Padre games.

    Soon after this I got involved with the local cable station in an effort to achieve stereo sound. The local office had a 'head end' and they let me work with it to get stereo, mainly for MTV, but I also helped them with their other stereo offerings, which were modulated to FM radio carriers so subscribers could 'sync' their TV with radio to get stereo sound.

    I did away with cable in Jan 84 when I got my first satellite dish and never had it again until I moved into this house in May of 92. I didn't subscribe, but it was here from the last owners installation. I had several satellite dishes here at that time and had no real use for the cable other than the fact that it included two local San Diego stations. I loved that. I didn't get games from them, but did get the local news which was very important for me.

    Sadly, they dropped those channels a few years later, but they did pick up the local Padre station for a while when San Diego hosted the first super bowl. It was obviously not baseball season, but the Cox 4 channel was picked up as it had lots of Super Bowl coverage. I was hopeful that I'd be able to get the Padre games once baseball season rolled around and I did for the start of the season. Unfortunately after three games it disappeared due to complaints by the Angels who didn't want them broadcasting Padre games to their region. Ugh.

    I was able to get many Padre games from the satellite by this time by finding backhaul feeds for whoever was broadcasting the games back to their local markets. This didn't include all games, but a good number of them. This was great but after the 1986 season the number of dish owners was becoming large enough that the broadcasters started scrambling many of the backhaul feeds and I was pretty much out of business.

    I was able to get many of the regional sports networks, and they did broadcast some Padre games on the various RSN's of teams that came to play in San Diego, but the Padres broadcast their games exclusively on cable and they were not about to let any of their games appear on the satellites because they wanted their customers to subscribe to cable.

    This sucked big time for me but there was not much I could do about it. Finally once Directv came along they eventually started offering baseball packages. Basically this was the RSN feeds, but since Cox would not share their games, I was still pretty much out of luck for the bulk of the games. Finally after a few years Cox subscribers realized that they were not able to get those RSN packaged games and they really wanted to deliver them to their subscribers to compete with satellite. Eventually they worked a deal where they had access to those games to provide them to their subsribers, but in order to do that, they had to provide Padre games so that they could also be included in the baseball packages.

    This was a huge thing for me, but it was only for the games. The pre and post game shows were not included. I could live with this, but really wanted the complete channels, not just during game time. Things went on like this for a few years until finally Fox Sports San Diego was created. They were no longer bound by Cox's anal policies and started up full time on the satellites. Finally I was able to get virtually all the Padre games, and in HD to boot.

    So I've been with Directv since they started.

    I should mention that in order to get setup with my first satellite dish in 1984, I got into that industry and became a dealer. That led to me doing about 100 large dish installations over the years. Of course I immediately noticed that the picture wasn't nearly as good as I could get with the big dish. It was sort of like migrating to CD's from LP's. The sound wasn't as good but it was surely more convenient.

    I had several dozen large dishes I had installed in hotels to provide guest programming, and before long I had converted those over to Directv. Consequently I got free Directv packages for my home showroom. I also figured out a way to order local channels from both San Diego and New York by creating accounts from those areas and using duplicate gear.

    Ultimately Directv cancelled my dealership in 2009 cancelling my healthy stream of commissions. I was shell shocked at first but realized that rather than be upset with them, I should be grateful for all they did for me. I did net nearly a quarter million dollars in commissions for the duration of my dealership, so rather than be upset with them, I continued with my subscriptions.

    Today I still have the showroom package, plus I also pay for 'local' service from LA, San Diego and New York. Considering all I got from them, I can't feel too bad about having to pay now. Meanwhile I get all the Padre games in HD (not that they're worth watching these days) plus just about all the movie channels. Basically I get everything Directv offers with the exception of PPV and Porn and I can surely live without those.

    Living in the LA area I also get what seems to be over 100 channels of terrestrial TV. Throw in all the streaming services and I feel like I've got about as many TV choices as one person could possibly have.
     
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