I love how they do the first continuity _before_ they start the encrypted broadcast, like "oh by the way here's exactly what you non-subscribers are gonna miss and exactly when you'll miss it"
Alphahydro I remember when parents got this, they would both work at night. So, me and my brothers would stay up late watching tv. So they had to split there work times, cause we would be late for school and they couldn’t figure out why😂😂
@@BlkSox71 kinda similar to my story. The TV my household had it installed on was in my parents bedroom. It was a treat to get the preview guides in the mail and thumb thru them, anticipating movies days or weeks away. Good times.
Spectrum was the first pay-tv service we had, and they had all of the really good movies, including international films. They would broadcast 24/7 on the weekends, which was a lot of fun.
This is great to see this after all these years! Great find! BTW from seeing the Spectrum promo description for the June preview for NEXT MONTH this recording was probably made sometime in the month of May 1983. By 1984 WFBN had dropped Spectrum and was airing music videos as "Music 66".
Thank you Chuck. This is the spectrum we had in Minneapolis in the early 80' it was this or HBO and there was no cable in the ground at that time. Both HBO and SPECTRUM were transmitted over the air. HBO had a small dish and SPECTRUM had a UHF antenna.
1:45 "Leon Isaac Kennedy is a man who struggles to overcome many obstacles in this drama" Written by an 8th grader who gave his book report in front of the class without actually reading the book.
It appears that WFBN was only broadcasting unscrambled programming for just four hours a day (5-9 A.M. CST/CDT). I believe that later in 1983, the FCC even dropped the rule requiring over-the-air pay-TV stations to even broadcast any unscrambled programming, so WFBN and other pay-TV stations were able, to broadcast scrambled Pay-TV programming 24/7 if they wanted.
The song that played during the scrolling movie schedule was "New York Connection" by Tom Scott ruclips.net/video/OpaewJ24Yuc/видео.html and when the Spectrum title card with the station announcement appeared,just before the signal scrambled,was "Birth" by Focus ruclips.net/video/aE-raLmhmHU/видео.html
@@ezritheking2809 Don't know the composer or title of the "Spectrum This Month" music bed, but it dates back to 1977 used by National Subscription Television for the first ON TV Pay Service in Los-Angeles, CA (their 40 second nightly opening montage)
How were the animations produced in this era? I started working with video production in my early teens around 1987, and even then, the state of computer graphics for a low budget operation was pretty limited, but many of the smallest, cheapest operations had animated clips like that..
@@michaelstein7850 No, the Amiga 1000 was not released till 85, and the VideoToaster system did not get released till 90, I remember watching Computer Chronicles back in 90 as a kid, and Stewart Cheifet making a big deal out of running on an Amiga 2000 system saying the system they used at his PBS station cost them $100K. So yeah Scanimate was short lived, but one way it was done. Oddity Archive has a video on Scanimate, and other tech related to it, which is a great watch.
I also later moved to the Apple // and used a program called Fontrix to design screens, store them to disk...then wrote an Applesoft basic program to load the screens into the ProDos ramdisk (floppy access was very slow, you could literally see the graphic loading line by line) and cycle through them.
Yes,now it's WGBO-TV owned by Univision,but back then it was owned by Focus Communications and later Grant Broadcasting,which is when it changed call letters to WGBO
Rudy Iraheta well in 1968 WCIU TV 26 has now secondary by SIN (1962-1987) (1968-1985) Univisión (1989-1995) Now: Independient Station Moved to The CW And Also WSNS TV 44 has now affilated by SIN/Univision (1985-1989) Now: Telemundo
You would call and sign up for a subscription and they sent out a converter box to connect to your TV,which unscrambled the over the air signal. Once cable TV became more widely available in Chicago and the suburbs in 1985 Pay TV services like ON-TV & Spectrum lost subscribers and they eventually shut down.
The Spectrum lineup is similar to cable movie channels today -- mostly mediocre films with maybe 1 or 2 somewhat current movies. I wonder if "adult" features then were the equivalent of "R" rated soft porn today.
@@JoebDragon Skinnamax is what we called it back in 80's, and 90's, back when you did not need a cable box to unscramble it, just the filters on the lines. 😎
@@bigorangetI realize that these days, but back in the late 80's, and early 90's our local cable company changed hands several times before becoming Palmetto cable for for about a decade then becoming G-Force in the early 00's and then sold to Cogent which branded it as AtlanticBroadBand aka AtlanticBB, which is all up, and down the east coast of the US, and they just very recently they rebranded as Breezeline, so trust me when I say with all the handovers, and poor oversight of the system we had very basic cable boxes with a simple red LED channel displays well into the early 00's that only needed to be on the main TV for PPV buys/scrambled channels(a lot of people did not have boxes at all) and all the other TV's in the house could catch all the channels with the line filters, and no box well into the late 00's after AtlanticBB took over, and then forced people to get digital cable boxes on each TV, and upped the rates. So just about everyone in my neighborhood these days just gets Internet, and maybe VOIP service from them.
No,the current Spectrum Cable (actually the name brand for the Time Warner and former Charter cable systems,similar to Comcast calling its cable & internet "Xfinity") is not related to the old Spectrum Pay TV service.
@@CrowTRobot-ni7zu It's still used for stuff not classified by the MPAA, or TV ratings system like independent films, or live news broadcast where lord knows what could happen.
I love how they do the first continuity _before_ they start the encrypted broadcast, like "oh by the way here's exactly what you non-subscribers are gonna miss and exactly when you'll miss it"
Smart Marketing.
"Here's what you could be watching if you built your own decoder!"
god, the music over the days schedule is absolutely lovely
This is good stuff. I don’t even know if the magnitude of this clip is realized. Definitely takes you back to simpler times.
Alphahydro I remember when parents got this, they would both work at night. So, me and my brothers would stay up late watching tv. So they had to split there work times, cause we would be late for school and they couldn’t figure out why😂😂
@@BlkSox71 kinda similar to my story. The TV my household had it installed on was in my parents bedroom. It was a treat to get the preview guides in the mail and thumb thru them, anticipating movies days or weeks away. Good times.
Spectrum was the first pay-tv service we had, and they had all of the really good movies, including international films. They would broadcast 24/7 on the weekends, which was a lot of fun.
This is great to see this after all these years! Great find!
BTW from seeing the Spectrum promo description for the June preview for NEXT MONTH this recording was probably made sometime in the month of May 1983. By 1984 WFBN had dropped Spectrum and was airing music videos as "Music 66".
Thank you for the info. I will edit the year in.
Thank you Chuck. This is the spectrum we had in Minneapolis in the early 80' it was this or HBO and there was no cable in the ground at that time. Both HBO and SPECTRUM were transmitted over the air. HBO had a small dish and SPECTRUM had a UHF antenna.
One of the all-time classic youtube videos
(was probably originally posted in 2007)
I called the number and the woman who answered wasn’t happy I asked for Spectrum
1:45 "Leon Isaac Kennedy is a man who struggles to overcome many obstacles in this drama"
Written by an 8th grader who gave his book report in front of the class without actually reading the book.
Channel 66 happened to air Bob Luce's Chicago Challenge Wrestling in 1989 and 1990, long after Spectrum was gone.
Love the music💯
Gumball Rally was the Cannonball Run before the Cannonball Run
I remember watching all that late night porn that was scrambled here in the Twin Cities at that time!
It appears that WFBN was only broadcasting unscrambled programming for just four hours a day (5-9 A.M. CST/CDT).
I believe that later in 1983, the FCC even dropped the rule requiring over-the-air pay-TV stations to even broadcast any unscrambled programming, so WFBN and other pay-TV stations were able, to broadcast scrambled Pay-TV programming 24/7 if they wanted.
Nice to see this video back. Cool looking service.
I remember watching the scrambled image for a few minutes.
This channel is now a Univision.
What is this music and where can I find it
The song that played during the scrolling movie schedule was "New York Connection" by Tom Scott
ruclips.net/video/OpaewJ24Yuc/видео.html
and when the Spectrum title card with the station announcement appeared,just before the signal scrambled,was "Birth" by Focus ruclips.net/video/aE-raLmhmHU/видео.html
But what about the song in the beginning
@@ezritheking2809 Sorry,I have no info about the song in the beginning
Chuck Snitchler ok thanks
@@ezritheking2809 Don't know the composer or title of the "Spectrum This Month" music bed, but it dates back to 1977 used by National Subscription Television for the first ON TV Pay Service in Los-Angeles, CA (their 40 second nightly opening montage)
Spectrum, originally was a pay TV service, is now a cable service.
These companies are not related, aren't they?
No,I believe the current Spectrum Cable is not related to the old Spectrum Pay TV service
@@cfs89 Not at all. Just a coincidence.
@@itogi Not at all. Spectrum is merely the customer facing name for Charter Cable.
@@johnnyfiveable And merged with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, which technically are the same anyway.
This was before Chicago had cable TV.
Well this was actually the precursor to Chicago cable TV.
How were the animations produced in this era?
I started working with video production in my early teens around 1987, and even then, the state of computer graphics for a low budget operation was pretty limited, but many of the smallest, cheapest operations had animated clips like that..
maybe video toaster for amiga?
scanimate, caesar, and similar machines ! The history on them is QUITE Fascinating so I recommend looking it up
@@michaelstein7850 No, the Amiga 1000 was not released till 85, and the VideoToaster system did not get released till 90, I remember watching Computer Chronicles back in 90 as a kid, and Stewart Cheifet making a big deal out of running on an Amiga 2000 system saying the system they used at his PBS station cost them $100K. So yeah Scanimate was short lived, but one way it was done. Oddity Archive has a video on Scanimate, and other tech related to it, which is a great watch.
Early EPGs at this time were being generated by Atari 8-bit computers. I'm sure they had a way.
I also later moved to the Apple // and used a program called Fontrix to design screens, store them to disk...then wrote an Applesoft basic program to load the screens into the ProDos ramdisk (floppy access was very slow, you could literally see the graphic loading line by line) and cycle through them.
That Channel 66 In Chicago IL is an affiliated by: Univision ok
Yes,now it's WGBO-TV owned by Univision,but back then it was owned by Focus Communications and later Grant Broadcasting,which is when it changed call letters to WGBO
where was sin
Rudy Iraheta well in 1968 WCIU TV 26 has now secondary by SIN (1962-1987)
(1968-1985) Univisión (1989-1995) Now: Independient Station Moved to The CW
And Also WSNS TV 44 has now affilated by SIN/Univision (1985-1989) Now: Telemundo
Chuck Snitchler oh thanks, I Love Univisión Chicago Ch 66 so much, That channel is like in spanish
@@miguelperez-gb5kr what station aired the cruz roja de univision commercial ad
How did this work? You would call and how would you unscramble it ?
You would call and sign up for a subscription and they sent out a converter box to connect to your TV,which unscrambled the over the air signal. Once cable TV became more widely available in Chicago and the suburbs in 1985 Pay TV services like ON-TV & Spectrum lost subscribers and they eventually shut down.
@@cfs89 sorry for being late but thank you for explaining it to me :)
Not enough resistors to clip in the world... Nothing a paperclip or cut resistor couldn't fix!
The Spectrum lineup is similar to cable movie channels today -- mostly mediocre films with maybe 1 or 2 somewhat current movies. I wonder if "adult" features then were the equivalent of "R" rated soft porn today.
+ the late night soft core stuff that used to be on hbo / max.
@@JoebDragon Skinnamax is what we called it back in 80's, and 90's, back when you did not need a cable box to unscramble it, just the filters on the lines. 😎
@@CommodoreFan64 that really depended on where you lived. Addressable scrambling was used in many cities dating back to the 1970s.
@@bigorangetI realize that these days, but back in the late 80's, and early 90's our local cable company changed hands several times before becoming Palmetto cable for for about a decade then becoming G-Force in the early 00's and then sold to Cogent which branded it as AtlanticBroadBand aka AtlanticBB, which is all up, and down the east coast of the US, and they just very recently they rebranded as Breezeline, so trust me when I say with all the handovers, and poor oversight of the system we had very basic cable boxes with a simple red LED channel displays well into the early 00's that only needed to be on the main TV for PPV buys/scrambled channels(a lot of people did not have boxes at all) and all the other TV's in the house could catch all the channels with the line filters, and no box well into the late 00's after AtlanticBB took over, and then forced people to get digital cable boxes on each TV, and upped the rates. So just about everyone in my neighborhood these days just gets Internet, and maybe VOIP service from them.
Some footage of the start-up of Spectrum PPV.
Nice!
question? Does this spectrum have ANYTHING to do with the one we have now
No,the current Spectrum Cable (actually the name brand for the Time Warner and former Charter cable systems,similar to Comcast calling its cable & internet "Xfinity") is not related to the old Spectrum Pay TV service.
@@cfs89 ok
What is NR rated content? Is it over 21 can watch that show/movie?
NR means not rated
@@InsanePsychoRabbit thanks for info!
Senn Lens commonly used back then for classic, animated, and foreign films.
@@CrowTRobot-ni7zu It's still used for stuff not classified by the MPAA, or TV ratings system like independent films, or live news broadcast where lord knows what could happen.
@@CommodoreFan64 Yes, I know.
Wfbi
WFBN ;)
This is WFBN-TV, Channel 66 in Joliet, Illinois 📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺.
papas, it's wrong, wfbn was sin, stands for spanish.
Now WGBO Univision O&O