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  #16  
Old 08-10-2016, 02:53 PM
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old_tv_nut old_tv_nut is offline
See yourself on Color TV!
 
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Should have known earlytelevision.org would have something:
http://www.earlytelevision.org/phonevision.html

Edit: I believe the picture of the scrambled image is a time exposure and doesn't properly show the jittery venetian blind effect. I think it's a multiple exposure of direct and delayed strips superimposed, which just looks like a bad ghost.

Also see:
http://chicagotelevision.com/pay.htm
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Last edited by old_tv_nut; 08-10-2016 at 02:59 PM.
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  #17  
Old 08-10-2016, 03:34 PM
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old_tv_nut old_tv_nut is offline
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Related:
http://chicagotelevision.com/pay2.htm
http://chicagotelevision.com/pay3.htm
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  #18  
Old 08-10-2016, 03:37 PM
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History of WHCT-TV with link to pay tv history:
http://www.kylebookholz.com/

http://www.kylebookholz.com/whct3.html [edit - I see this was already posted]
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Last edited by old_tv_nut; 08-10-2016 at 03:44 PM.
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  #19  
Old 08-10-2016, 08:46 PM
Olorin67 Olorin67 is offline
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When I was in the MSOE dorms, about 1989. We set up our own cable system by drilling holes through the concrete walls to run a cable to each room, one room on the end of the building with a direct view of the transmitter on the 1st Wisconsin building had the receiver, don't remember exactly how it was descrambled. We also had a few VCRs hooked up on other channels, to distribute around the floor. I think one person had a laserdisc player, so we so times would rent movies like star wars to get a better picture than VHS.
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  #20  
Old 08-10-2016, 11:30 PM
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Boobtubeman Boobtubeman is offline
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I used to have a SELECTV box that decoded OTA and it used a phone line for billing, i remember tapping into the phone line and recording the binary conversation between the 2 modems...

Nowadays, just a few videocipher units rotting in the closet..

I too remember the coffee can project to receive ONTV programming especially after 10pm when it got INTERESTING...

SR
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  #21  
Old 08-11-2016, 06:53 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
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Cleveland had subscription TV for a short time in the early 1980s. The station was on channel 61 and carried standard, unscrambled TV shows (mostly off-network reruns and movies) until 8 p. m., then it switched to STV the rest of the night. The STV programming could only be viewed on TVs with a special pay-TV decoder box and a single-channel UHF antenna especially constructed for channel 61 and only that channel. I saw a few of these antennas in my old neighborhood (an eastern suburb of Cleveland), and there were probably more such antennas on houses closer to town, but the service wasn't nearly as popular there (or anywhere else in the metro area) as the station was hoping it would be.

The Cleveland STV service ended, if I remember correctly, some time before the end of the decade, and subscription TV itself ended not long after that. Detroit also had an STV station on channel 20 (WXON ON TV) which probably lasted about as long as Cleveland's did, or maybe a bit longer since Detroit is a much larger city than Cleveland.

I think pay cable movie channels such as HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, et al., to say nothing of pay-per-view (PPV), finally killed OTA subscription TV. The few stations which had carried the service are now affiliated with networks the likes of The CW and others.

BTW, in the early '70s I remember seeing at least one TV with a Phonevision socket on the rear apron of the chassis. The set was a 1954 Zenith 21" b&w console, the type with a tuner that took two revolutions of the channel selector to cover all 13 channels.
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Last edited by Jeffhs; 08-11-2016 at 07:03 PM.
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  #22  
Old 08-11-2016, 07:07 PM
consoleguy67 consoleguy67 is offline
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Here on Long Island, we had WHT, Wometco Home Theatre. It was sent over channel 68, out of Smithtown,NY.
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  #23  
Old 08-16-2016, 09:37 PM
centralradio centralradio is offline
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Wow .Its strange that these boxes were only 30 miles away from me at Ch 18.Now a Spanish station.I heard about their system and WHT in NJ.The family here was into HBO when it started in the 1970's.Never got involve in these other pay TV channels.Thanks for sharing.

They can probably do pay OTA TV today since todays TV is digital and somehow block/scramble the channel with ease.
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