Thank's for the shout out, Ben. That's my tear down video you mentioned. No I didn't drill out the bottom screws, I just used a standard flat head screwdriver in one of the three screw slots, and was able to slowly turn the screws (that's why I skipped that part, it took about 10 minutes). It was way easier then I thought it was going to be, not too secure. I can send you a video of how to do it if you want. Cheers!
It's hilarious to me that they have "security" screws. Just like with pad locks, they only keep the honest out. If you have an allen head fastener with the pin in the middle you can use a small flathead screwdriver to wedge into the side pocket and actually use the post as leverage to break the screw loose. It's so easy they really are just wasting money on making worthless fasteners.
It must be noted, that any TV service that uses "ON" in its name is bound to fail. In the UK we had ONdigital, which was essentially a farce. Renaming itself ITV Digital (Look at me moonkeh!) did little to boost success, and it was only the inevitable shutdown and purchase that gave us the free terrestrial service that we use to this day. As a pay service it was an insult.
I remember my family having a pirate box that unscrambled the cable signal, so we had free cable up until the late 90's when they started going digital. They would catch people by airing commercials that could only be seen through the pirate box which offered free stuff to people if they called the number shown.
There's an old trick to unscrew weird screws... take a bic or biro pen, wave a cigarette lighter over the end till it goes soft, then push it onto the screw, and hey presto, you have a screwdriver for it. the "screwdriver" will only last a couple of unscrewings, but enough to normally do the job at hand.
@@inny74 a LBJ comment is a sign you made it as a youtuber. He watches a lot and seems to be everywhere, but he isn't commenting on "my super awesome minecraft let's play part 73 with under 10 views" type videos.
There was at least one microwave service after 1987: Wireless One, which existed circa 1995-2000 in the deep South. There’s also one still active in Minnesota called MVTV. I think it uses DTV channels.
Nope! Scrambled mode was wavy lines down the middle of the screen without sound and there were times when ONTV would come in clear for some time. I knew two people who subcribed to ONTV, one of them had Adults ONly as well, and would sometimes watch movies at their house. I remember seeing Magic (1978) and The Island (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) with my friends. In South Florida you tunned your set to UHF channel 51 and then switched the nob from OFF to ONTV and then you watched movies on it. Fun stuff.
Regarding the end of analog TV in the US, there are still a few low-power translators and stations still broadcasting in analog. Sioux Falls supposedly has one of these on channel 26 according to FCC records. That station is KCPO-LP, a very low budget independent station you can also get on cable. The FCC has now set July 13, 2021 as the hard date for any remaining low power translators/stations to convert to digital, bringing the definite end to the analog TV era.
EncoreEnterprisesLLC in North Battleford Saskatchewan Canada channel 6 (CTV Saskatoon) can still be received via rabbit ears. Also throughout the province Access Communications supplies analog cable and charges (in my community) $40.85 for channels 2-26.
@@5roundsrapid263According to this document, the July 13, 2021 date appears to be related to the spectrum repack and how LPTV stations will move to new channels or go dark.
I wonder if it was "hard coded" into the frequency that ONTV was using out west. The PRISM microwave feed is still used to this day for Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, They were using it as a loophole to keep it from DBS satelite tv.
Yes. We had this when I was a kid. The box was hardwired to pickup UHF channel 15 as that was the frequency ON broadcast on in our area. The VHS RF output is probably 2 or 3.
I'd assume that the box is tuned internally to UHF channel 52, and if you want to get anything out of it, you'd have to either have something that can output video on UHF 52, or open it up and try to bypass the tuner.
When I was 10, my father, an electronics engineer and hobbyist, built an ON TV decoder. He found the plans someplace and installed his decoder into a small black and white TV set. In our area, ON TV was carried on channel 64. He put a switch on the side of the TV for ON and TV. At 10, you would turn on channel 64, and when the program started and scrambled, you flipped the switch to decode it. It was black and white, and the picture was not quite perfect, but we watched bootlegged ON TV for months on that little TV set. ON TV was the first place I saw Airplane! They also ran promos for On Golden Pond and Kramer Versus Kramer.
Those screws look the same as what Fisher-Price used in their toy record players. There is one company selling a very overpriced matching bit to remove them. p.s. When talking about a radio/TV antenna, the plural is "antennas". (Antennae is only the plural when talking about the appendages on insects.)
We had Super TV when I was little, and we even recorded a few movies off of it (Star Wars was the big one). Years later, after the company folded, my brother and I took the box apart, and it looked pretty much like a Zenith TV of the time inside, with those white thick-film things and tan circuit boards. We never did figure out how it worked.
Something of note, maybe for Non-Cable Pay TV vol. 3: there were a couple of more-recent OTA pay TV services that rented bandwidth from local DTV stations, since stations can put non-DTV stuff in their digital signals. Two were USDTV and AirBox; there may have been others. Also, the law regarding TV licenses in the US specifically requires a 5% tax, on top of the regular license fees, of all OTA pay tv revenue- the feds definitely had OTA pay TV in mind. (47 CFR 73.624g)
KBSC (now KVEA) was the local Telemundo station in Southern California and had broadcast equipment (like everyone else in LA) atop Mount Wilson. They were part of Kaiser Broadcasting but weren't picked up by Field Communications when FC bought out Kaiser. We had ONTV at my roommate's apartment in Century City, which only broadcast after 8PM til (I think) 5AM M-Th then all weekend from Friday night to Monday morning. Your set up is right on. Your VHF/UHF antennas hooked in to the ONTV box, then you went out to the TV. Turn to channel 3, flip the knob to ON, cool, you're watching ONTV. There were some shenanigans going on with channel 52's sync signal. When ONTV started up, the interference would be introduced and you needed the box to decode it. The box is forever tuned to channel 52, then passed the decoded signal over channel 3 to your set. Since they didn't have a key, i think it was a flat rate per month. I don't really know, my roommate paid for it. The box only decodes, so, I don't know what you expected it to do when you turned the knob. It doesn't have an ONTV logo generator or anything. ONTV broadcast promos for like 5 minutes before it started a movie; they'd go live at 8PM and promo til 8:05 then a movie or event would begin. Since movies are varying lengths, if a movie ended at say 11:40, it would promo til 11:45, if it ended at 11:50, it would promo til midnight. The biggest thing they did was make an exclusive deal with George Lucas to show Star Wars. I remember that we had a taping party. This is all remembered from a haze close to 40 years ago at a time in my life which was basically in chaos.
I was very young when on tv and select tv were broadcasting. I do remember watching my first music videos on on tv. Olivia Newton John's Physical and Hall and Oat's Private eye, after we saw those two videos we were constantly hopping they'd showed more music videos. We did get see alot good movies though.
Having been in a cable region (Charlotte, NC), these over the air paid services are totally new to me! I can imagine the poor signal quality in bad reception areas, and descrambler hijinks. Thanks for the tour down this rabbit hole!
We had ON-TV in the Phoenix area in 1982. A technician came out to the house an installed a small antenna on the roof that was smaller than our regular TV antenna. That was our ON-TV reception source. We also used it to get independent KNXV channel 15 in clearly during the day. Before the installation that channel came in very snowy.
My family had on TV back in the late 70s and early 80s. The Box just basically work as a descrambler. You had to hook up a special antenna that set on the roof of your house. It's a different antenna then your standard TV FM antenna. Don't know exactly how it worked but if you try to use a standard FM antenna, the box would not work.
Pay TV wasn't widely available in Australia until the 90s, Galaxy was one of the first companies offering a service, but they were also the first company to go bust.
I remember our family having it around 1982 in Phoenix. I don't remember ours having wood grain framing but that cracks me up. It would blend right in with all the dark wood furniture that was popular.
I remember Channel 68. I used to watch The Uncle Floyd Show and reruns of Green Acres. I guess when WHT stopped carrying on that frequency, the station became a music video station called U68, which eventually became the Home Shopping Network. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
Another great episode...nice recycling of "Love for Sale" from the Vinyl Potpourri episode for the box repair sequence, and enjoyed learning the history of all the major over-the-air pay services, including a few that I wasn't even aware of!
I live in Rhode Island, but growing up somehow got awesome reception to quite a few channels in the Boston market. Between this video mentioning WQTV 68 and a documentary I found on Amazon Prime talking about V 66, I'm piecing together some of my traumatizing TV viewing moments that didn't make much sense, until now, where I can kinda have an understanding where some of those wacky shows came from.
One thing that you missed. At the very end, ON was purchased by the owners of SelecTV (or vice versa). SelecTV had more subscribers, so we had to turn in our ON boxes and exchange them for SelecTV boxes. This also meant that we lost ONtv programming, in favor of SelecTV, obviously. Yes, there was a difference. ON was better. Cable was available to my neighborhood right as this happened, so we went very quickly to SelecTV and then cable.
This was pre cable in the Chicagoland area. We ended up with a “cheater box”. But they would often scramble the single and tell you that you are stealing, using a old style robot voice. My friends got cable in 1984 and we finally did in 1986. So happy to see MTV at age 16. OnTV did show sexy squishy time videos after midnight but they were a bit edited. I got busted trying to tune in late one night but luckily talked my way out of it. Those wee the days in 1983.
I remember when we first moved to Sacramento in 1987, the house my parents bought had an antenna on the roof that was motorized and you aimed it by turning a knob in the house. I seem to remember we kept it at least a year before they bought cable and now I know why they pretty much kept it as long as they did.
Ben, the old video game collectors trick to open NES cartridges should work for you; heat up a bic pen with a lighter until the plastic is soft and then jam said pen on to the screw. This will make you a custom screwdriver molded to that special screw.
We had SuperTV at home in Baltimore, and I remember the box for the service just being a box with a single button to activate the service. Years later when I was helping my dad redo his living room and we moved his TV from one side of the room to the other, there was a cable disconnected under the TV. Checking the line, yup that was the SuperTV cable.
LOL! The BBC type Television vans scare tactic they have in the UK. 😂 Seriously, look them up. I was a pre-teen kid in the early 80's and remember having a 5" black and white TV that I tuned to a high UHF channel to see very soft core porn ON TV broadcast that was scrambled. The audio still came on very scrambled sounding like robots moaning with an echo. I just turned the volume down. It was titillating for a young kid. It came on after 11:00 PM Friday-Sunday in LA. For some reason that 5" TV had a better tuner or something because the picture rolled way less often than the *LOL* big 19" color TV. I do vaguely recall in the mid 80's that ON TV and SelectV merged in LA. 🤔 it's been a long time and some things I don't remember that well.
Here in the Netherlands we have digitenne, it's in HD but they are planning full HD this year. To think of it... it is kinda niche, but I like it because I only have to use a CF card in my TV. Although I will need a new box when they broadcast in full HD
Here in the Cincinnati area, our channel for ON-TV was channel 64, then under the call letters WBTI. WBTI spent part of its day as a regular broadcast station, then switched to ON-TV around 5 PM. This arrangement lasted a few years before ON-TV was cancelled. WBTI became WIII, then WSTR. We always wondered what they broadcast on that ON-TV lineup; later I found out that at least some of their programming was sports. They broadcast some Reds games and some boxing. ON-TV also showed some first-run movies and some movie classics.
Amazing piece! Cable TV junkie, wish this could be a weekly feature. Select in LA was run thru KWHY TV channel 22 which ran from 3pm until 3am I believe. Great thing from them was that at least once a month they would go unencrypted because they were having relay problems. We'd get a few days of free stuff. They and ON scrambled both audio and video on UHF, so you couldn't even listen 😫
No the true pipe dream these days with the advent of "cord cutter" streaming services would be a la carte TV. The only one that comes close to doing that was Sling with it's small channel "add ons" but it's still like being able to pick and choose the channels you want.
Super TV having a different feed for Baltimore somewhat made sense. Washington lacked a baseball team from 1972-2004, and the Orioles were one of the best teams at the time.
@@newstarcadefan Yeah. Charge more to enjoy Murray, Ripken, et al. It would possibly have been cheaper to go to Memorial Stadium. HTS was still several years away.
I have parts of the ON-TV system as my grandmother worked building then at the Oak Industries assembly plant in Elkhorn, WI. She knew I was into electronics & brought me things here & there. She retired in 83.
I grew up in SoCal and remembered when ON TV was available. Or neighbors had one and it was like magic back then. Mmm...softcore pr0n during your teen years. I also recall the decoder boxes we tried to copy in junior high-school shop/electronics class.
It was the antenna connected. For most, that was a roof antenna wired through the walls. There are still OTA signals - works with any old style UHF/VHF antenna.
Also, did you try running that scrambled footage of the Chinese cooking show through your ONtv box? Also, check out the British ON-TV when digital TV began, absolute disaster that nearly bankrupted the football Association over a failed TV deal.
@Larry Bundy Jr Wouldn't work. That's a tape from a very different service called Tele1st (which Ben discussed in his original Pay-TV episode) which operated much differently from other services. In short: while those were meant to be watched live, Tele1st had to be taped, then played back with your VCR output to a descrambler box. (I don't think you'd be able to descramble footage recorded to tape if it requires a full video signal to work, which a consumer-level tape format won't provide.)
Makes me wish drripco were still around to ask (no idea whatever happened to him, his channel's gone and he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth in general), but I think you may still need the Tele1st box to decode.
Something I’ve been hoping you’d go back to for a while. This is a very interesting topic for me. We have several tapes of movies off of ON-TV (WXON) such as “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Being There,” and “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.” Alas, I’ve found almost no footage (on tape or UA-cam) of “In-Home Theatre,” or “IT.” There was also a service in Livonia, MI called MORE-TV that beamed HBO directly to subscribers. Incidentally, one of the things I do know about “IT” that you missed is that it was really only viewable in the Detroit area in the western suburbs. Since it was transmitted from west of Ann Arbor, it was mostly directed towards Lansing, Jackson, etc.
IT was based out of Ann Arbor technically, it used channel 31 and its call letters were WIHT, of course Ann Arbor technically is considered part of the Detroit TV market anyway. Today the station is owned and operated by Ion Media Networks. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPXD-TV
@@CrowTRobot-ni7zu Who knows, it comes down to whoever in the area had a VCR and a subscription at the time in order to have recorded anything and kept it this long.
Christopher Sobieniak you might be interested to know I found a Toledo clip in my dad’s tape bin, today. He recorded “The Andromeda Strain” in 1985, off of WGTE, which he received on cable in Ann Arbor. A bit snowy picture, but that’s Ann Arbor cable for you!
The ON TV converter box likely had a tuner in it that was preset to whatever channel it was broadcasting on in a particular market. My guess is since your box was from Los Angeles, the integrated tuner is set to channel 52 so when you turn the box on, its sending the output of ch52. You’re getting snow because there is nothing on Ch.52. When you turn the box off, it passes through the antenna signal directly to your TVs tuner just like a VCR would when it’s powered off.
In the New York City Area there was WHT (Wometco Home Theater) on Channels 67 and 68. The scrambled audio was a "barker channel" telling you how to subscribe. You could never hear the actual audio of the movie unless of course you had the descrambler. The scrambled picture was just about impossible to view, but occasionally you might catch a a view for a few seconds or so if you messed around with the tuning. I heard that WHT showed X rated flicks later at night, but I can't confirm that.
Hi, I just started watching your channel, though have been a member of Fuzzy Memories for years. I remember On Tv in Chicago because it used to be on a channel I watched often, 44. On then took over and we didn't have it, but my neighbors did so we went over to their house to watch. Sometimes we would put the channel on at home and sometimes we could pick it up, other times we got a scrambled picture. We didn't have cable then so this was the only chance to get paid channels. Eventually On Tv went off and channel 44 to my dismay, didn't return to playing old shows but went Spanish.
once the tape was recorded it was clear so the box shouldn't be scrambled. One thing I remember from on was the fact my pops was selling bootleg boxes that he would make. They worked quite good as he improved the entire box. This was the LA area. It was on more than one channel. There were 5 ON UHF stations. One was disney / family related the rest were a split between sports and movies.
My grandparents had ON TV in the 70's and 80's, via Los Angeles station KBSC. My guess on how the descrambler box worked was that it would receive KBSC's signal (channel 52) and route it to channel 3. During ON TV hours the box would descramble the signal, and at all other hours KBSC's regular signal simply passed through, like an old-school UHF to VHF adapter. I remember watching "The Little Rascals" and "The Addams Family" that way just before channel 52 switched to ON TV at 7pm weeknights.
The way that the ONTV box was connected was with a small dedicated single-channel UHF Yagi antenna that the installer would install onto your roof. In Los Angeles, that antenna was resonant at channel 52. That antenna was connected the the "IN UHF" connector on the ONTV box. Your existing VHF/UHF rooftop antenna would connect to the other antenna input (the "IN" connector), and the "OUT VHF" would go to your TV. When the box was OFF , you would receive regular TV from your existing antenna. When you switch the box ON, your rooftop antenna was disconnected and the box would then receive through the "IN UHF" antenna connector, and that output would then be transmitted from the box on channel 3 to your TV set. during the day when channel 52 showed its normal programming, you would simply be watching channel 52 through the ONTV box if you were to switch it on. If you wanted to test the box out with the VCR, you would need to find a way to get the channel 3 output of the VCR to transmit on channel 52, then out that signal to the UHF input on the box, which would then show that on channel 3 on your TV. SelecTV was also available in Los Angeles over TV channel 22 using the same type of schedule. Channel 22 would have its normal programming during the day, which consisted of stock market programming, then the channel would scramble at night for SelecTV. Its scrambling method was different from ONTV. ONTV scrambling was basically a sine wave, with eh middle of the picture being very dark, and the sync pulse being very light, and your TV would actually sync on the middle of the picture, which made it unwatchable unless there was a bright scene which would shift the sync pulse to being the dark part of the picture and you could see something. SelecTV's scrambling looks like it used a negative picture, including the sync pulse. the sync pulse was normally the blackest part of the signal, but with SelecTV, that was the whitest part of the signal, and the picture was very dark in comparison, which made it even harder to watch if you weren't a subscriber. ONTV utilized moving the sound to a subcarrier. If you turned the sound on your TV up all the way, you could kind of hear the sound from the ONTV programming. SelecTV did something similar, but differently. The sound may have been converted to something like AM instead of FM, and you could tell that the sound was there but couldn't really hear anything intelligible. I was able to hear the sound on my TV if I turned off the AFC control and slightly de-tuned the channel. Sometime in the mid 80s or so, SelecTV bought ONTV (or it may have been the other way around), and both services had the same programming. I believe that the ONTV transmissions were eventually phased out and you had to get a SelecTV box in order to continue watching the service. Eventually cable TV was wired into the urban areas of Los Angeles, and for the same price, many, many channels were available, with a variety of movie channels to choose from, that OTA subscription TV was no longer profitable, and ONTV/SelecTV went away.
I remember IT very well, I grew up in the TV 41 viewing area. We didn't subscribe, but knew many who did. I think it was less popular in Tulsa itself than in the small towns and rural areas that couldn't get cable TV [Tulsa had cable TV fairly early on.] Like a lot of these services, I think the adult movies at night were the main draw [I was a kid at the time and there was always one guy in the playground who claimed to have stayed up and watched them.]
Oh wow, I had no idea that any Dallas/Fort Worth stations had been part of these services! My family moved there in late 1984, after KNBN 33 became Metromedia-owned KRLD (until just a couple years later when Fox started up and it became KDAF) and KTWS 27 became KDFI which it continues to be today. Also it seems so weird to imagine Atlanta still not having MTV in 1984, as they were a major cable pioneer being the home of TBS, CNN, and The Weather Channel.
Me: "Man, could you imagine using multiple services just to be able to enjoy watching things on TV?" Also Me: *has Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+...*
This is why I hope the whole "premium streaming service" craze crashes in the future. I don't want to pay for a service just to watch certain movies and tv shows. Because of this, I mostly torrent and buy DVDs and Blu-Rays for my TV and movie fix instead.
And the first true "cable" box that I remember back in early 80's.. Had the cable hook up to a television box that hooks up to your TV.. Then it was connected to a box with a long cord attached. To a box with a slider thingy that changes the channel. Almost like a remote control but not really.. And when my parents got that cable box.. Gave me my first introduction to MTV.
In the early 80s l had Preview. I lived in Ohio. It came on after, I think around 5pm. You had to tune in a UHF channel. I got rid of it when cable came to my area.
ON TV?? i remember in the late 70's seen commercials for ON and IT TV. Memory is a little fuzzy IT TV. no pun intended. On IT. Pun intended. For IT TV. But ON.... RIngs a bell.. It was a bit before HBO hit the scene.. and living in Michigan it makes sense now.
It's supposed to work like that. Remember, this was an OTA broadcast. Off just passes the standard signal through the box to the TV. In Chicago, WSNS broadcast regular TV for much of the day, and when it switched over to the ONTV broadcast in the afternoon, it would show scrambled in the off position. You flip the box to "ON" and it decodes the scrambled/encrypted signal. The reason you get snow now is because your VCR isn't broadcasting a signal that the decoder circuit understands. The box has to receive a coded signal from the company kind of like Phonevision did.
I remember my dad getting ONTV it back in the day. Lived in the Los Angeles suburbs Norwalk. I remember the antenna looking like half one of of those cooling wire racks. Every once in a while, ONTV would have special movies that would cost an extra fee ($7.99 IIRC) and saw Star Wars and Popeye. I vividly remember watching Popeye as at a point in the movie where Popeye was looking through a peephole type hole in a door and the video like got scratched and stopped. Parents got pissed and a moment later, the movie resumed from a moment before it crashed. We had it for a while until real cable came into the area.
I recall IT TV back home in Michigan, and how channel 31 in Ann Arbor was its (npi) home. I didn't realize the whole channel was the subscription TV channel, unlike WXON for ON-TV for only a few hours a day.
Hey, nice to know my neck of the woods had one of these weird pay-TV systems, not to mention a few unique things about it! Now I know one more thing that'll stick with me about the old independent version of Baltimore's WNUV, TV-54. It had Super TV, it was the inspiration for the excellent low-budget Halloween horror movie The WNUF Halloween Special and finally its cheesy tagline, "Where your vote counts!"
Holy shit. This is old school. I can remember the little antenna that they stuck on the antenna that was already on our roof. It looked like the holy grail. Good movies to. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, a clockwork orange, altered states. Good find.
I had on TV in Chicago over channel 44 back then. They gave you a small white yagi antenna optimized for UHF. The UHF channel would send out a coded signal and the on TV box would just decode it and pass it along to its RF modulator on channel 3.
So, you're telling me there was an actual Channel Z and wasn't just made for the B-52s song. Side note: I watch a bit of Channel 57 earlier. It's also referenced in a Dead Milkmen song.
@@1000huzzahs The Z Channel was awesome. They showed the uncut Heaven's Gate during commercial video tape's infancy, which basically means before you could go to a store and rent a movie.
As an electronic hobbyist in the 80s, my friends and I MADE our own ON tv boxes! The video signal from chn 20 in Detroit was stripped of horizontal sync pulses. The audio contained a 15khz subcarrier that was easily recovered using a FM radio stereo demodulator chip's phase locked loop, who's clock was used to regenerate the horizontal sync. We would make home made pc boards and modify our tvs using Sam's photo fax prints. Worked great. Didn't need a box with ch20 tuner. There was a large underground of people doing this. Was NOT illegal because if a home owner can decode a signal spayed into your home, it's legal. You just can't commercialize it.
Oops, forgot to say, that stereo audio signal had the mono audio placed 180 degrees out of phase so the normal undecoded audio was muted. You used ether the left or right audio out of the FM stereo decoder for the audio. Really a pretty good system for the times.
WIHT Ch 31 Ann Arbor for a while broadcast scrambled TV 24 Hours/day. The barker channel re-broadcast the NOAA weather on 162 MHz out of Lansing. The cable TV company where I lived in suburban Detroit carried WIHT because the started as part time in the clear. When it went to full time Pay TV they continued to carry it, because it was a full time station in the Detroit market. I believe they had addressable capability on their cable boxes, too. ABC was experimenting with broadcast PAY TV, they actually had FCC authorization to broadcast pay tv on their O&O stations. I worked at WXYZ-TV then, a couple times I saw scrambled feeds over the regular ABC Net feed when programming was done for the night. It didn't alter the sync so it could actually be recorded and played back through an authorized decoder. As far as I know, they experimented with it briefly over WLS, then dropped the idea.
We had ON TV in LA/Orange County in the late 70s when I was a kid. Then cable came out and I had to set my 8-bit floppy disk video game pirating business aside so I could climb the telephone pole and hook up free cable!! Man I was such a criminal when I was 10.
Great Video, I have really enjoyed it. There was one over the air pay TV service you didn't mention. It was called 'Spectrum' and was out of Chicago on channel 66. I still have (somewhere) several of the decoder boxes for that service. A fun and good time back then...
So it's five years later now, and I'm not sure how far you ended up getting with this, but I'll give you some pretty good information about it, because I lived in the Chicagoland area back when OnTV was a thing, and even know someone who had it (they lived in Chicago Heights). First, the reason that there's a UHF connector on there is because the scrambled signal was broadcast on WSNS, Channel 44. The station was a normal OTA station during the day, but around 5pm they transitioned to scrambled OnTV broadcasting. The reason they had an installer set the thing up for you is because, in addition to the set-top box you have there, they would install a very good outdoor UHF antenna and then bring the feed from that inside the house, where it hooked up to the UHF input on the box, which is permanently tuned to UHF NTSC channel 44. The other two VHF terminals are for an input and an output. When the box is "off", the VHF input (presumably a VCR) would pass through the unit and you would see it on VHF channel 3 (as you would normally expect). When you turn the switch to ON, the VHF input was cut off, and the UHF input was unscrambled and then output in a viewable format on VHF channel 3. Fun fact, later on, ON TV came up with a program called "Adults ONly), presumably the 1980's equivalent of The Playboy channel. The scrambling algorithm was changed again, and you had to get a newer box that supported both scrambling algorithms if you wanted to watch Adults ONly (and of course, there was a premium fee associated with that). Of, if you wanted to actually test this thing out, you would need to take a captured recording of the scrambled signal, then use a modulator to output that on to UHF channel 44, and run it through the device. I'm not 100% certain that would work, because of the way scrambled programming worked. Basically, your VCR records the stuff it NEEDS to record in order to re-produce a viable picture, not necessarily EVERYTHING that's encoded in the TV broadcast signal. The signal was "scrambled" by messing with the sync pulses that make the picture align. The signal is "unscrambled" because the box knows how to "fix" the "broken" NTSC signal that was broadcast. The reason you see a "scrambled" image without the box is because the TV doesn't know what to do with that funky sync signal. So, in the end, if you recorded a scrambled signal, I cannot guarantee that the VCR would capture what the box needs to "unscramble" it, or if what it records is just its best attempt to make sense of a signal that wasn't viewable in its native state. It's also worth nothing that similar technologies were used to implement "copyguard", a mechanism used to defeat video tape piracy (copying video tapes). What they did there was do something to mess with the chominance component of the NTSC signal. While your TV had no problem with that (hence you would see a prefect picture), whatever it was that they did would screw with the way the signal levels were interpreted by a VCR and would render the resulting recording unviewable (for the most part). FUN FACT about that technology, for a time at least, Dish Network used to put the CopyGuard signal in their broadcast (to prevent you from recording stuff from their set top box). It was problematic though, because if you had one of those TV-VCR combos (like a lot of people had back n the 90's), that CopyGuard signal, coming in over the air, would be processed through the VCR component, which would improperly interpret the screwed up signal, and you get that funky output from everything you watched, just like if you tried to watch a pirated copy-protected VHS tape. Dish Network eventually quit doing that, but by the 2000's and the era of the DVR had come, they started setting what's called the "CCI Byte" on stream for certain programming, which would make it impossible to transfer content between DVR's, even ones on the same account. More of Big Brother thanks to DMA or whatever it's called.
The reason the TV scrambles when the ONTV box is turned on is because it's an inserter, and is prepared to insert the signal on the channel it's set to communicate on.
We had it in Cincinnati starting in 1980. Channel 64 would run regular programming until 6:00 PM and you'd turn on your ONTV box to access the cable programming. It stayed around until I believe the mid 80's. Warner Amex cable was just too much competition for them
My dad had a box for ontv ch44 in Chicago in the early 80s. He obtained a non legitimate box for it from ppl he worked with I believe (he worked in tech back then). I remember it didn't have an actual knob on it, it had a metal flip switch on it and didn't have any logos or on it. I think he paid like 200 bux for it back then. I remember around 1985, cable tv finally started to show up in the Chicago area, and it was gone. We then suddenly had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. I do remember with the ontv box on uhf ch44, the channel would occasionally fade out and it would rescramble again and then unscramble.
From the OnTV box's markings and behaviour I'm guessing its meant to be outputting the decoded stream on Channel 3 - But it may be expecting the incoming feed to be on a completely different channel, It also looks like turning the box on kills the RF pass-threw, If you really want to get those screws out you've got a good chance with a flat bladed screwdriver or 2 in the slots, That they are going into tapped holes in metal as soon as you get them started they should be extremely easy to remove, It might look better with careful use of a black marker to fill the dings in - and a silver one on the control knob Great channel - Keep up the great work!
Thank's for the shout out, Ben. That's my tear down video you mentioned. No I didn't drill out the bottom screws, I just used a standard flat head screwdriver in one of the three screw slots, and was able to slowly turn the screws (that's why I skipped that part, it took about 10 minutes). It was way easier then I thought it was going to be, not too secure. I can send you a video of how to do it if you want. Cheers!
It's hilarious to me that they have "security" screws. Just like with pad locks, they only keep the honest out. If you have an allen head fastener with the pin in the middle you can use a small flathead screwdriver to wedge into the side pocket and actually use the post as leverage to break the screw loose. It's so easy they really are just wasting money on making worthless fasteners.
Get a box. Be a guest on Ben's show.
It must be noted, that any TV service that uses "ON" in its name is bound to fail. In the UK we had ONdigital, which was essentially a farce. Renaming itself ITV Digital (Look at me moonkeh!) did little to boost success, and it was only the inevitable shutdown and purchase that gave us the free terrestrial service that we use to this day. As a pay service it was an insult.
To be fair, paying Millions of pounds you don't have for lower level football wasn't gonna bring in the big bucks anyway.
I'm thinking a pay TV service running over-the-air on ATSC 3.0 lighthouses could work, but only if the management was competent enough.
I remember my family having a pirate box that unscrambled the cable signal, so we had free cable up until the late 90's when they started going digital. They would catch people by airing commercials that could only be seen through the pirate box which offered free stuff to people if they called the number shown.
Hi I’m Clorox, nice to meet you
it’s crazy that they catch people who called the number and get banished to jail
There's an old trick to unscrew weird screws... take a bic or biro pen, wave a cigarette lighter over the end till it goes soft, then push it onto the screw, and hey presto, you have a screwdriver for it.
the "screwdriver" will only last a couple of unscrewings, but enough to normally do the job at hand.
Hello, You! Didn't know you had interests outside PC & Video gaming.
I wasn't expecting to see you here.
@@mattwolf7698 Larry is literally everywhere, and his presence never fails to make me smile.
@@inny74 a LBJ comment is a sign you made it as a youtuber. He watches a lot and seems to be everywhere, but he isn't commenting on "my super awesome minecraft let's play part 73 with under 10 views" type videos.
There was at least one microwave service after 1987: Wireless One, which existed circa 1995-2000 in the deep South. There’s also one still active in Minnesota called MVTV. I think it uses DTV channels.
Nope! Scrambled mode was wavy lines down the middle of the screen without sound and there were times when ONTV would come in clear for some time. I knew two people who subcribed to ONTV, one of them had Adults ONly as well, and would sometimes watch movies at their house. I remember seeing Magic (1978) and The Island (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) with my friends. In South Florida you tunned your set to UHF channel 51 and then switched the nob from OFF to ONTV and then you watched movies on it. Fun stuff.
Regarding the end of analog TV in the US, there are still a few low-power translators and stations still broadcasting in analog. Sioux Falls supposedly has one of these on channel 26 according to FCC records. That station is KCPO-LP, a very low budget independent station you can also get on cable. The FCC has now set July 13, 2021 as the hard date for any remaining low power translators/stations to convert to digital, bringing the definite end to the analog TV era.
My cable provider still had certain local channels that were analog until February 5th.
EncoreEnterprisesLLC in North Battleford Saskatchewan Canada channel 6 (CTV Saskatoon) can still be received via rabbit ears. Also throughout the province Access Communications supplies analog cable and charges (in my community) $40.85 for channels 2-26.
@@BBC600 Some analog repeaters for private channels still exist in Canada like CKCO's Oil Springs/Sarnia transmitter in southwestern Ontario.
The FCC shut down the last analog LPTV stations about a year ago. There are very few left if any.
@@5roundsrapid263According to this document, the July 13, 2021 date appears to be related to the spectrum repack and how LPTV stations will move to new channels or go dark.
I wonder if it was "hard coded" into the frequency that ONTV was using out west. The PRISM microwave feed is still used to this day for Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, They were using it as a loophole to keep it from DBS satelite tv.
That's my guess as well. When switched on, the ONTV box is looking for the signal from KBSC on channel 52.
Yes. We had this when I was a kid. The box was hardwired to pickup UHF channel 15 as that was the frequency ON broadcast on in our area. The VHS RF output is probably 2 or 3.
I was in the military near Long Beach, CA in the early-mid 1980s. We had no cable on base, so the only options were On and Select. Quite a few got it.
I'd assume that the box is tuned internally to UHF channel 52, and if you want to get anything out of it, you'd have to either have something that can output video on UHF 52, or open it up and try to bypass the tuner.
One of my favorite topics of classic Archive! Color me pumped!
The first volume is probably the best Archive episode. Telefirst has to be the most bizarre TV service ever!
@@5roundsrapid263 agreed!!!
When I was 10, my father, an electronics engineer and hobbyist, built an ON TV decoder. He found the plans someplace and installed his decoder into a small black and white TV set.
In our area, ON TV was carried on channel 64. He put a switch on the side of the TV for ON and TV. At 10, you would turn on channel 64, and when the program started and scrambled, you flipped the switch to decode it. It was black and white, and the picture was not quite perfect, but we watched bootlegged ON TV for months on that little TV set. ON TV was the first place I saw Airplane! They also ran promos for On Golden Pond and Kramer Versus Kramer.
Those screws look the same as what Fisher-Price used in their toy record players. There is one company selling a very overpriced matching bit to remove them. p.s. When talking about a radio/TV antenna, the plural is "antennas". (Antennae is only the plural when talking about the appendages on insects.)
On TV is a boring 1 channel TV service.
And Chicago had been using antennas to watch TV.
I bet you could just design and 3D print a screwdriver for it, then put the file online for everyone to use.
We had Super TV when I was little, and we even recorded a few movies off of it (Star Wars was the big one). Years later, after the company folded, my brother and I took the box apart, and it looked pretty much like a Zenith TV of the time inside, with those white thick-film things and tan circuit boards. We never did figure out how it worked.
Something of note, maybe for Non-Cable Pay TV vol. 3: there were a couple of more-recent OTA pay TV services that rented bandwidth from local DTV stations, since stations can put non-DTV stuff in their digital signals. Two were USDTV and AirBox; there may have been others. Also, the law regarding TV licenses in the US specifically requires a 5% tax, on top of the regular license fees, of all OTA pay tv revenue- the feds definitely had OTA pay TV in mind. (47 CFR 73.624g)
also with ATSC 3.0 they can have pay channels on it
I remember seeing commercials for USDTV!
We had one of these when I was a kid. My dad bought a "cheater box" at work for 50 bucks. I saw a lot of great movies on that thing, lol!
Good times
KBSC (now KVEA) was the local Telemundo station in Southern California and had broadcast equipment (like everyone else in LA) atop Mount Wilson. They were part of Kaiser Broadcasting but weren't picked up by Field Communications when FC bought out Kaiser. We had ONTV at my roommate's apartment in Century City, which only broadcast after 8PM til (I think) 5AM M-Th then all weekend from Friday night to Monday morning.
Your set up is right on. Your VHF/UHF antennas hooked in to the ONTV box, then you went out to the TV. Turn to channel 3, flip the knob to ON, cool, you're watching ONTV. There were some shenanigans going on with channel 52's sync signal. When ONTV started up, the interference would be introduced and you needed the box to decode it. The box is forever tuned to channel 52, then passed the decoded signal over channel 3 to your set. Since they didn't have a key, i think it was a flat rate per month. I don't really know, my roommate paid for it.
The box only decodes, so, I don't know what you expected it to do when you turned the knob. It doesn't have an ONTV logo generator or anything. ONTV broadcast promos for like 5 minutes before it started a movie; they'd go live at 8PM and promo til 8:05 then a movie or event would begin. Since movies are varying lengths, if a movie ended at say 11:40, it would promo til 11:45, if it ended at 11:50, it would promo til midnight.
The biggest thing they did was make an exclusive deal with George Lucas to show Star Wars. I remember that we had a taping party. This is all remembered from a haze close to 40 years ago at a time in my life which was basically in chaos.
I was very young when on tv and select tv were broadcasting. I do remember watching my first music videos on on tv. Olivia Newton John's Physical and Hall and Oat's Private eye, after we saw those two videos we were constantly hopping they'd showed more music videos. We did get see alot good movies though.
Telemundo came to Channel 52 in Los Angeles long after ON TV went defunct.
@@altfactor Sorry,, you're right.
Having been in a cable region (Charlotte, NC), these over the air paid services are totally new to me! I can imagine the poor signal quality in bad reception areas, and descrambler hijinks. Thanks for the tour down this rabbit hole!
We had ON-TV in the Phoenix area in 1982. A technician came out to the house an installed a small antenna on the roof that was smaller than our regular TV antenna. That was our ON-TV reception source. We also used it to get independent KNXV channel 15 in clearly during the day. Before the installation that channel came in very snowy.
The original videos you did on this back in the day are still my favorite. So glad to see this come up again!
I was born in 1982 this subject is one of my favorites.
My family had on TV back in the late 70s and early 80s. The Box just basically work as a descrambler. You had to hook up a special antenna that set on the roof of your house. It's a different antenna then your standard TV FM antenna. Don't know exactly how it worked but if you try to use a standard FM antenna, the box would not work.
We had it in the 80s but if I remember correctly we had a indoor antenna with ours
Pay TV wasn't widely available in Australia until the 90s, Galaxy was one of the first companies offering a service, but they were also the first company to go bust.
I remember our family having it around 1982 in Phoenix. I don't remember ours having wood grain framing but that cracks me up. It would blend right in with all the dark wood furniture that was popular.
That Fuji videotape brings back memories! We HAD those exact tapes, just the T120 VHS versions.
I remember Channel 68. I used to watch The Uncle Floyd Show and reruns of Green Acres. I guess when WHT stopped carrying on that frequency, the station became a music video station called U68, which eventually became the Home Shopping Network. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
Another great episode...nice recycling of "Love for Sale" from the Vinyl Potpourri episode for the box repair sequence, and enjoyed learning the history of all the major over-the-air pay services, including a few that I wasn't even aware of!
I live in Rhode Island, but growing up somehow got awesome reception to quite a few channels in the Boston market. Between this video mentioning WQTV 68 and a documentary I found on Amazon Prime talking about V 66, I'm piecing together some of my traumatizing TV viewing moments that didn't make much sense, until now, where I can kinda have an understanding where some of those wacky shows came from.
Hey Ben, you know what else has those weird Tri Point security screws... the original Atari Pong.
One thing that you missed. At the very end, ON was purchased by the owners of SelecTV (or vice versa). SelecTV had more subscribers, so we had to turn in our ON boxes and exchange them for SelecTV boxes. This also meant that we lost ONtv programming, in favor of SelecTV, obviously. Yes, there was a difference. ON was better. Cable was available to my neighborhood right as this happened, so we went very quickly to SelecTV and then cable.
This was pre cable in the Chicagoland area. We ended up with a “cheater box”. But they would often scramble the single and tell you that you are stealing, using a old style robot voice. My friends got cable in 1984 and we finally did in 1986. So happy to see MTV at age 16. OnTV did show sexy squishy time videos after midnight but they were a bit edited. I got busted trying to tune in late one night but luckily talked my way out of it. Those wee the days in 1983.
I'm so glad OddityArchive still has a comments section...
I remember when we first moved to Sacramento in 1987, the house my parents bought had an antenna on the roof that was motorized and you aimed it by turning a knob in the house. I seem to remember we kept it at least a year before they bought cable and now I know why they pretty much kept it as long as they did.
Ahh yes good ol' WSNL airing reruns of Saturday Night Live all week! 🤣
Ben, the old video game collectors trick to open NES cartridges should work for you; heat up a bic pen with a lighter until the plastic is soft and then jam said pen on to the screw. This will make you a custom screwdriver molded to that special screw.
We had SuperTV at home in Baltimore, and I remember the box for the service just being a box with a single button to activate the service.
Years later when I was helping my dad redo his living room and we moved his TV from one side of the room to the other, there was a cable disconnected under the TV. Checking the line, yup that was the SuperTV cable.
LOL! The BBC type Television vans scare tactic they have in the UK. 😂 Seriously, look them up.
I was a pre-teen kid in the early 80's and remember having a 5" black and white TV that I tuned to a high UHF channel to see very soft core porn ON TV broadcast that was scrambled. The audio still came on very scrambled sounding like robots moaning with an echo. I just turned the volume down.
It was titillating for a young kid. It came on after 11:00 PM Friday-Sunday in LA. For some reason that 5" TV had a better tuner or something because the picture rolled way less often than the *LOL* big 19" color TV.
I do vaguely recall in the mid 80's that ON TV and SelectV merged in LA. 🤔 it's been a long time and some things I don't remember that well.
In Germany we still have terrestrial pay TV. It's called Freenet TV somewhat ironically.
and not only germany. italia and croatia also have dvb-t/dvb-t2 pay tv. we only never had analog pay tv. you needed satellite for that.
Here in the Netherlands we have digitenne, it's in HD but they are planning full HD this year.
To think of it... it is kinda niche, but I like it because I only have to use a CF card in my TV. Although I will need a new box when they broadcast in full HD
In Germany, you do not pay to watch television. Television pays to watch you! What a country !
France, too. Canal+ has been broadcasting scrambled programming over-the-air since its 1984 launch (though it's now in digital only).
France, too. Canal+ has been broadcasting scrambled programming over-the-air since its 1984 launch (though it's now in digital only).
Here in the Cincinnati area, our channel for ON-TV was channel 64, then under the call letters WBTI. WBTI spent part of its day as a regular broadcast station, then switched to ON-TV around 5 PM. This arrangement lasted a few years before ON-TV was cancelled. WBTI became WIII, then WSTR. We always wondered what they broadcast on that ON-TV lineup; later I found out that at least some of their programming was sports. They broadcast some Reds games and some boxing. ON-TV also showed some first-run movies and some movie classics.
Amazing piece! Cable TV junkie, wish this could be a weekly feature.
Select in LA was run thru KWHY TV channel 22 which ran from 3pm until 3am I believe. Great thing from them was that at least once a month they would go unencrypted because they were having relay problems. We'd get a few days of free stuff.
They and ON scrambled both audio and video on UHF, so you couldn't even listen 😫
No the true pipe dream these days with the advent of "cord cutter" streaming services would be a la carte TV. The only one that comes close to doing that was Sling with it's small channel "add ons" but it's still like being able to pick and choose the channels you want.
Super TV having a different feed for Baltimore somewhat made sense. Washington lacked a baseball team from 1972-2004, and the Orioles were one of the best teams at the time.
Yes, that aboslutely makes sense. Washington got the Nationals (after they were extricated from Montréal in 2004
@@newstarcadefan Yeah. Charge more to enjoy Murray, Ripken, et al. It would possibly have been cheaper to go to Memorial Stadium. HTS was still several years away.
The Bullets were doing well at the time, too, though the Caps were still pretty much an afterthought until the Ovechkin era.
I have parts of the ON-TV system as my grandmother worked building then at the Oak Industries assembly plant in Elkhorn, WI. She knew I was into electronics & brought me things here & there. She retired in 83.
Half assed cleaning? Screw that, we need to go full assed!
I grew up in SoCal and remembered when ON TV was available. Or neighbors had one and it was like magic back then. Mmm...softcore pr0n during your teen years.
I also recall the decoder boxes we tried to copy in junior high-school shop/electronics class.
It was the antenna connected. For most, that was a roof antenna wired through the walls. There are still OTA signals - works with any old style UHF/VHF antenna.
Also, did anyone have Pink Floyd flashbacks when watching the flowers during the end gag?
Also, did you try running that scrambled footage of the Chinese cooking show through your ONtv box?
Also, check out the British ON-TV when digital TV began, absolute disaster that nearly bankrupted the football Association over a failed TV deal.
@Larry Bundy Jr Wouldn't work. That's a tape from a very different service called Tele1st (which Ben discussed in his original Pay-TV episode) which operated much differently from other services. In short: while those were meant to be watched live, Tele1st had to be taped, then played back with your VCR output to a descrambler box. (I don't think you'd be able to descramble footage recorded to tape if it requires a full video signal to work, which a consumer-level tape format won't provide.)
Makes me wish drripco were still around to ask (no idea whatever happened to him, his channel's gone and he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth in general), but I think you may still need the Tele1st box to decode.
@@iamnomad101 Okay, but VCRs just record the raw signal anyway, so I don't see why live descrambling wouldn't work?
Oh, you're talking about OnDigital (later ITV Digital)? I remember reading about that...
kinda makes me wish ben had a tele1st box... That cooking show goes for $1k on Amazon per tape.
Something I’ve been hoping you’d go back to for a while. This is a very interesting topic for me. We have several tapes of movies off of ON-TV (WXON) such as “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Being There,” and “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.” Alas, I’ve found almost no footage (on tape or UA-cam) of “In-Home Theatre,” or “IT.” There was also a service in Livonia, MI called MORE-TV that beamed HBO directly to subscribers. Incidentally, one of the things I do know about “IT” that you missed is that it was really only viewable in the Detroit area in the western suburbs. Since it was transmitted from west of Ann Arbor, it was mostly directed towards Lansing, Jackson, etc.
IT was based out of Ann Arbor technically, it used channel 31 and its call letters were WIHT, of course Ann Arbor technically is considered part of the Detroit TV market anyway. Today the station is owned and operated by Ion Media Networks.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPXD-TV
Christopher Sobieniak that’s right. I believe the closest town to their transmitter was Chelsea. I wonder if any more footage of IT will ever surface.
@@CrowTRobot-ni7zu Who knows, it comes down to whoever in the area had a VCR and a subscription at the time in order to have recorded anything and kept it this long.
So cool to learn more about my home area. Especially since I was a little kid during this era. So memories are few & far between.
Christopher Sobieniak you might be interested to know I found a Toledo clip in my dad’s tape bin, today. He recorded “The Andromeda Strain” in 1985, off of WGTE, which he received on cable in Ann Arbor. A bit snowy picture, but that’s Ann Arbor cable for you!
20:02 lmao they used their simple CG and typed a bunch of O’s down the sides of the screen to simulate film perfs
**chef's kiss**
The ON TV converter box likely had a tuner in it that was preset to whatever channel it was broadcasting on in a particular market. My guess is since your box was from Los Angeles, the integrated tuner is set to channel 52 so when you turn the box on, its sending the output of ch52. You’re getting snow because there is nothing on Ch.52. When you turn the box off, it passes through the antenna signal directly to your TVs tuner just like a VCR would when it’s powered off.
In the New York City Area there was WHT (Wometco Home Theater) on Channels 67 and 68. The scrambled audio was a "barker channel" telling you how to subscribe. You could never hear the actual audio of the movie unless of course you had the descrambler. The scrambled picture was just about impossible to view, but occasionally you might catch a a view for a few seconds or so if you messed around with the tuning. I heard that WHT showed X rated flicks later at night, but I can't confirm that.
They did indeed show adult programming during overnights, under the "Nightcap" branding (whose logo featured a black cat).
Hi, I just started watching your channel, though have been a member of Fuzzy Memories for years. I remember On Tv in Chicago because it used to be on a channel I watched often, 44. On then took over and we didn't have it, but my neighbors did so we went over to their house to watch. Sometimes we would put the channel on at home and sometimes we could pick it up, other times we got a scrambled picture. We didn't have cable then so this was the only chance to get paid channels. Eventually On Tv went off and channel 44 to my dismay, didn't return to playing old shows but went Spanish.
once the tape was recorded it was clear so the box shouldn't be scrambled. One thing I remember from on was the fact my pops was selling bootleg boxes that he would make. They worked quite good as he improved the entire box. This was the LA area. It was on more than one channel. There were 5 ON UHF stations. One was disney / family related the rest were a split between sports and movies.
My grandparents had ON TV in the 70's and 80's, via Los Angeles station KBSC. My guess on how the descrambler box worked was that it would receive KBSC's signal (channel 52) and route it to channel 3. During ON TV hours the box would descramble the signal, and at all other hours KBSC's regular signal simply passed through, like an old-school UHF to VHF adapter. I remember watching "The Little Rascals" and "The Addams Family" that way just before channel 52 switched to ON TV at 7pm weeknights.
The way that the ONTV box was connected was with a small dedicated single-channel UHF Yagi antenna that the installer would install onto your roof. In Los Angeles, that antenna was resonant at channel 52. That antenna was connected the the "IN UHF" connector on the ONTV box. Your existing VHF/UHF rooftop antenna would connect to the other antenna input (the "IN" connector), and the "OUT VHF" would go to your TV. When the box was OFF , you would receive regular TV from your existing antenna. When you switch the box ON, your rooftop antenna was disconnected and the box would then receive through the "IN UHF" antenna connector, and that output would then be transmitted from the box on channel 3 to your TV set. during the day when channel 52 showed its normal programming, you would simply be watching channel 52 through the ONTV box if you were to switch it on.
If you wanted to test the box out with the VCR, you would need to find a way to get the channel 3 output of the VCR to transmit on channel 52, then out that signal to the UHF input on the box, which would then show that on channel 3 on your TV.
SelecTV was also available in Los Angeles over TV channel 22 using the same type of schedule. Channel 22 would have its normal programming during the day, which consisted of stock market programming, then the channel would scramble at night for SelecTV. Its scrambling method was different from ONTV. ONTV scrambling was basically a sine wave, with eh middle of the picture being very dark, and the sync pulse being very light, and your TV would actually sync on the middle of the picture, which made it unwatchable unless there was a bright scene which would shift the sync pulse to being the dark part of the picture and you could see something. SelecTV's scrambling looks like it used a negative picture, including the sync pulse. the sync pulse was normally the blackest part of the signal, but with SelecTV, that was the whitest part of the signal, and the picture was very dark in comparison, which made it even harder to watch if you weren't a subscriber. ONTV utilized moving the sound to a subcarrier. If you turned the sound on your TV up all the way, you could kind of hear the sound from the ONTV programming. SelecTV did something similar, but differently. The sound may have been converted to something like AM instead of FM, and you could tell that the sound was there but couldn't really hear anything intelligible. I was able to hear the sound on my TV if I turned off the AFC control and slightly de-tuned the channel.
Sometime in the mid 80s or so, SelecTV bought ONTV (or it may have been the other way around), and both services had the same programming. I believe that the ONTV transmissions were eventually phased out and you had to get a SelecTV box in order to continue watching the service. Eventually cable TV was wired into the urban areas of Los Angeles, and for the same price, many, many channels were available, with a variety of movie channels to choose from, that OTA subscription TV was no longer profitable, and ONTV/SelecTV went away.
I remember IT very well, I grew up in the TV 41 viewing area. We didn't subscribe, but knew many who did. I think it was less popular in Tulsa itself than in the small towns and rural areas that couldn't get cable TV [Tulsa had cable TV fairly early on.] Like a lot of these services, I think the adult movies at night were the main draw [I was a kid at the time and there was always one guy in the playground who claimed to have stayed up and watched them.]
Wometco Home Theater was the model for Ugetsu home theater(run by scamster Guy Cabellero) on the comedy series Second City TV.
Oh wow, I had no idea that any Dallas/Fort Worth stations had been part of these services! My family moved there in late 1984, after KNBN 33 became Metromedia-owned KRLD (until just a couple years later when Fox started up and it became KDAF) and KTWS 27 became KDFI which it continues to be today. Also it seems so weird to imagine Atlanta still not having MTV in 1984, as they were a major cable pioneer being the home of TBS, CNN, and The Weather Channel.
Mmm...Microwave TV... O.o; makes you kinda hungry.
And we had PREVIEW on CH 27 in Wooster MA using a zenith box
Star Wars was first broadcast on TV on OnTV. The audio was simulcast over FM so everyone could have "good" sound.
Me: "Man, could you imagine using multiple services just to be able to enjoy watching things on TV?"
Also Me: *has Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+...*
This is why I hope the whole "premium streaming service" craze crashes in the future. I don't want to pay for a service just to watch certain movies and tv shows. Because of this, I mostly torrent and buy DVDs and Blu-Rays for my TV and movie fix instead.
And the first true "cable" box that I remember back in early 80's..
Had the cable hook up to a television box that hooks up to your TV..
Then it was connected to a box with a long cord attached.
To a box with a slider thingy that changes the channel.
Almost like a remote control but not really..
And when my parents got that cable box..
Gave me my first introduction to MTV.
Thank you so much Ben ! this just made my weekend.. so so Nolgastic, bring back great memories
I got ON TV in the early 80's back in Los Angeles. It was like WOW! check me out.
First ones on the block to have anything like this.
We had ONTV in Cincinnati, Ohio as well. I remember it was broadcast on UHF channel 64 after 8 or 9 PM as far as I remember. :)
In the early 80s l had Preview. I lived in Ohio. It came on after, I think around 5pm. You had to tune in a UHF channel. I got rid of it when cable came to my area.
People used to eat a lot of beans to use their own gas to pirate the natural gas pay TV.
ON TV??
i remember in the late 70's seen commercials for ON and IT TV.
Memory is a little fuzzy IT TV.
no pun intended.
On IT.
Pun intended.
For IT TV.
But ON....
RIngs a bell..
It was a bit before HBO hit the scene..
and living in Michigan it makes sense now.
It's supposed to work like that. Remember, this was an OTA broadcast. Off just passes the standard signal through the box to the TV. In Chicago, WSNS broadcast regular TV for much of the day, and when it switched over to the ONTV broadcast in the afternoon, it would show scrambled in the off position. You flip the box to "ON" and it decodes the scrambled/encrypted signal. The reason you get snow now is because your VCR isn't broadcasting a signal that the decoder circuit understands. The box has to receive a coded signal from the company kind of like Phonevision did.
I remember my dad getting ONTV it back in the day. Lived in the Los Angeles suburbs Norwalk. I remember the antenna looking like half one of of those cooling wire racks. Every once in a while, ONTV would have special movies that would cost an extra fee ($7.99 IIRC) and saw Star Wars and Popeye. I vividly remember watching Popeye as at a point in the movie where Popeye was looking through a peephole type hole in a door and the video like got scratched and stopped. Parents got pissed and a moment later, the movie resumed from a moment before it crashed. We had it for a while until real cable came into the area.
I recall IT TV back home in Michigan, and how channel 31 in Ann Arbor was its (npi) home. I didn't realize the whole channel was the subscription TV channel, unlike WXON for ON-TV for only a few hours a day.
A burning question remains: did they show IT on IT?
@Chriddof hey no problem. Fancy seeing you here!
"Hey, if the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."
Hey, nice to know my neck of the woods had one of these weird pay-TV systems, not to mention a few unique things about it! Now I know one more thing that'll stick with me about the old independent version of Baltimore's WNUV, TV-54. It had Super TV, it was the inspiration for the excellent low-budget Halloween horror movie The WNUF Halloween Special and finally its cheesy tagline, "Where your vote counts!"
Holy shit. This is old school. I can remember the little antenna that they stuck on the antenna that was already on our roof. It looked like the holy grail. Good movies to. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, a clockwork orange, altered states. Good find.
Allow me to compliment that music collection. Ramones AND Rundgren? I'd listen to that station.
I had on TV in Chicago over channel 44 back then. They gave you a small white yagi antenna optimized for UHF. The UHF channel would send out a coded signal and the on TV box would just decode it and pass it along to its RF modulator on channel 3.
YAY! Quality content!
(Goes Scrambled)
...dangit.
So, you're telling me there was an actual Channel Z and wasn't just made for the B-52s song.
Side note: I watch a bit of Channel 57 earlier. It's also referenced in a Dead Milkmen song.
Wow hadn't thought of that song in years. Thanks for the memories ( and the earworm)😁🙃
Yeah it has its own documentary even. It was an arthouse movie channel that was highly curated by this really weird man who later committed suicide.
@@1000huzzahs sounds like the kind of guy I'd be a fan of.
@@1000huzzahs The Z Channel was awesome. They showed the uncut Heaven's Gate during commercial video tape's infancy, which basically means before you could go to a store and rent a movie.
As an electronic hobbyist in the 80s, my friends and I MADE our own ON tv boxes! The video signal from chn 20 in Detroit was stripped of horizontal sync pulses. The audio contained a 15khz subcarrier that was easily recovered using a FM radio stereo demodulator chip's phase locked loop, who's clock was used to regenerate the horizontal sync. We would make home made pc boards and modify our tvs using Sam's photo fax prints. Worked great. Didn't need a box with ch20 tuner. There was a large underground of people doing this. Was NOT illegal because if a home owner can decode a signal spayed into your home, it's legal. You just can't commercialize it.
Oops, forgot to say, that stereo audio signal had the mono audio placed 180 degrees out of phase so the normal undecoded audio was muted. You used ether the left or right audio out of the FM stereo decoder for the audio. Really a pretty good system for the times.
WIHT Ch 31 Ann Arbor for a while broadcast scrambled TV 24 Hours/day. The barker channel re-broadcast the NOAA weather on 162 MHz out of Lansing. The cable TV company where I lived in suburban Detroit carried WIHT because the started as part time in the clear. When it went to full time Pay TV they continued to carry it, because it was a full time station in the Detroit market. I believe they had addressable capability on their cable boxes, too.
ABC was experimenting with broadcast PAY TV, they actually had FCC authorization to broadcast pay tv on their O&O stations. I worked at WXYZ-TV then, a couple times I saw scrambled feeds over the regular ABC Net feed when programming was done for the night. It didn't alter the sync so it could actually be recorded and played back through an authorized decoder. As far as I know, they experimented with it briefly over WLS, then dropped the idea.
I had an ON-TV box back in the day, when I lived in suburban Detroit. Good times.
EDIT: I remember IT, too!
I DON'T HAVE A VERY ILLEGAL THING HERE
I AM WATCHING IT UNSCRAMBLED VIA UA-cam PREMIUM UNSCRAMBLER DECODER BOX FOR WINDOWS 10 PCs and TVs
Blonder Tongue! What a bizarre company name. Were there really two people with those last names? Or did someone just want an odd company name?
Not sure, but their A/V equipment is top notch industrial stuff. I have one of their modulators, and it's built like a tank
We had ON TV in LA/Orange County in the late 70s when I was a kid. Then cable came out and I had to set my 8-bit floppy disk video game pirating business aside so I could climb the telephone pole and hook up free cable!! Man I was such a criminal when I was 10.
Great Video, I have really enjoyed it. There was one over the air pay TV service you didn't mention. It was called 'Spectrum' and was out of Chicago on channel 66. I still have (somewhere) several of the decoder boxes for that service. A fun and good time back then...
I believe he briefly mentioned it in his original Pay TV episode IIRC
So it's five years later now, and I'm not sure how far you ended up getting with this, but I'll give you some pretty good information about it, because I lived in the Chicagoland area back when OnTV was a thing, and even know someone who had it (they lived in Chicago Heights).
First, the reason that there's a UHF connector on there is because the scrambled signal was broadcast on WSNS, Channel 44. The station was a normal OTA station during the day, but around 5pm they transitioned to scrambled OnTV broadcasting. The reason they had an installer set the thing up for you is because, in addition to the set-top box you have there, they would install a very good outdoor UHF antenna and then bring the feed from that inside the house, where it hooked up to the UHF input on the box, which is permanently tuned to UHF NTSC channel 44.
The other two VHF terminals are for an input and an output. When the box is "off", the VHF input (presumably a VCR) would pass through the unit and you would see it on VHF channel 3 (as you would normally expect). When you turn the switch to ON, the VHF input was cut off, and the UHF input was unscrambled and then output in a viewable format on VHF channel 3.
Fun fact, later on, ON TV came up with a program called "Adults ONly), presumably the 1980's equivalent of The Playboy channel. The scrambling algorithm was changed again, and you had to get a newer box that supported both scrambling algorithms if you wanted to watch Adults ONly (and of course, there was a premium fee associated with that).
Of, if you wanted to actually test this thing out, you would need to take a captured recording of the scrambled signal, then use a modulator to output that on to UHF channel 44, and run it through the device. I'm not 100% certain that would work, because of the way scrambled programming worked. Basically, your VCR records the stuff it NEEDS to record in order to re-produce a viable picture, not necessarily EVERYTHING that's encoded in the TV broadcast signal. The signal was "scrambled" by messing with the sync pulses that make the picture align. The signal is "unscrambled" because the box knows how to "fix" the "broken" NTSC signal that was broadcast. The reason you see a "scrambled" image without the box is because the TV doesn't know what to do with that funky sync signal. So, in the end, if you recorded a scrambled signal, I cannot guarantee that the VCR would capture what the box needs to "unscramble" it, or if what it records is just its best attempt to make sense of a signal that wasn't viewable in its native state.
It's also worth nothing that similar technologies were used to implement "copyguard", a mechanism used to defeat video tape piracy (copying video tapes). What they did there was do something to mess with the chominance component of the NTSC signal. While your TV had no problem with that (hence you would see a prefect picture), whatever it was that they did would screw with the way the signal levels were interpreted by a VCR and would render the resulting recording unviewable (for the most part). FUN FACT about that technology, for a time at least, Dish Network used to put the CopyGuard signal in their broadcast (to prevent you from recording stuff from their set top box). It was problematic though, because if you had one of those TV-VCR combos (like a lot of people had back n the 90's), that CopyGuard signal, coming in over the air, would be processed through the VCR component, which would improperly interpret the screwed up signal, and you get that funky output from everything you watched, just like if you tried to watch a pirated copy-protected VHS tape.
Dish Network eventually quit doing that, but by the 2000's and the era of the DVR had come, they started setting what's called the "CCI Byte" on stream for certain programming, which would make it impossible to transfer content between DVR's, even ones on the same account. More of Big Brother thanks to DMA or whatever it's called.
You should look for scrambled ONTV footage and put it through the box.
The reason the TV scrambles when the ONTV box is turned on is because it's an inserter, and is prepared to insert the signal on the channel it's set to communicate on.
We had it in Cincinnati starting in 1980. Channel 64 would run regular programming until 6:00 PM and you'd turn on your ONTV box to access the cable programming. It stayed around until I believe the mid 80's. Warner Amex cable was just too much competition for them
Thanks Ben..
For giving me some good nostalgic itches to scratch..
Thank you and your box.. 🤘
This was 100 times better than Cable of today!
Also that filter makes the end music very reminiscent of Tic Tac Dough lmao
My dad had a box for ontv ch44 in Chicago in the early 80s. He obtained a non legitimate box for it from ppl he worked with I believe (he worked in tech back then). I remember it didn't have an actual knob on it, it had a metal flip switch on it and didn't have any logos or on it. I think he paid like 200 bux for it back then. I remember around 1985, cable tv finally started to show up in the Chicago area, and it was gone. We then suddenly had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. I do remember with the ontv box on uhf ch44, the channel would occasionally fade out and it would rescramble again and then unscramble.
Yes I had the ON TV cable service which was on from 7:30pm till 1:am with uncut movies and sports events
In Canada we have this thing called Pik TV now which is a similar "pay for only specific channels" model with a box and all.
I remember when I was a kid my dad got a schematic for an OnTV box and built his own. It kinda worked.
From the OnTV box's markings and behaviour I'm guessing its meant to be outputting the decoded stream on Channel 3 - But it may be expecting the incoming feed to be on a completely different channel,
It also looks like turning the box on kills the RF pass-threw,
If you really want to get those screws out you've got a good chance with a flat bladed screwdriver or 2 in the slots, That they are going into tapped holes in metal as soon as you get them started they should be extremely easy to remove,
It might look better with careful use of a black marker to fill the dings in - and a silver one on the control knob
Great channel - Keep up the great work!