Oddity Archive: Episode 277.1 - Ben’s Junk: Wometco Home Theatre (WHT) Pay TV Decoder Box
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- Опубліковано 14 лют 2024
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Ben is slowly becoming the hypothetical guy from Chicago that hoards a shit ton of decoder boxes for failed pay tv services
EIA code 232 means it was made by Magnavox in Knoxville, TN. I'm within range of channel 68, but by the time I was old enough to watch TV on my own, they had become a Home Shopping Network affiliate. Before WHT, the station was first owned by Blonder-Tongue Labs -- yes, the rack-mount TV modulator manufacturer. And that reference to "BTVision" on the back piqued my interest -- turns out that was Blonder-Tongue's own pay-TV service that they had launched on channel 68, which Wometco bought out in 1976.
1:38 Even as your life is going off the rails, you're still doing a bang-up job. Ben, hope your father is having more good days than bad, and your a real trooper for stepping up. Sending positive vibes your way!
$85 in 1980 is worth $318.15 today
$20 in 1980 is worth $74.86 today
WWHT, Channel 68, Newark NJ. They would play weird anime and local shows before the service started at about 4 PM (?). Watched Raideen and Cyborg 009 through high school and college. Also, Uncle Floyd. Good job on the research, Benny-Boy.
WHT didn't start until 8:00 pm. Uncle Floyd was on at 6:00.
Previous call signs for channel 68 were WBTB and WTVG.
Ch 68 aired the cult classic Uncle Floyd Show
@@themoviedealers Thanks for the info. Hard to believe that's 40+ years ago. Many of us at Stevens Tech made Uncle Floyd a habit and he played a live show there once.
Ben is one step closer to finally getting that sacred Tele1st box
We can only dream.
@@OddityArchive remember in episode 15 where you theorized about a guy from Chicago with a bunch of stacked decoder boxes? Well, Congratulations, You have become that person. 🙂
@@newmedia2862Actually that was episode thirteen to be exact.
I worked at WHT in 1980, out of the office in Fairfield, NJ. My primary job was to pick up the retuned decoder boxes from field offices and return back to NJ. The antennas were left on the roof or chimney because it was too much of a bother to uninstall and the antennas were cheaply made and damaged easily. The Fairfield and field offices were the most unprofessional places I have ever worked. Maybe it just that period in time. Coke was passed around like candy and it seemed like most of the women in the office were having affairs with management. The only department that worked hard was the accounting area but the women there were also frisky. I guess times have changed as most of this behavior would be considered harassment today. Thanks for bringing back the memories after 44 years. I learned nothing working there.
It is important to learn nothing from anything ever
@mjrleaguesweetie I "learned" I was at at dead-end job, but I would say that was more common sense on my part. Thanks for your comment.
Every so often, you'd catch a boob or two when the signal would briefly sync. Good time to be a 16 year old.
The fact that it still works is fascinating. Another great vid and an incredible find. Good work Ben.
Great piece, Ben. The first time I ever saw a decoder box of that nature, I was visiting my aunt - it was Christmas 1976, she lived in Bellevue WA, had just had cable installed, and they had a Showtime box for movies - they were only on the air from 8 PM-3 AM at the time. When they weren't on the air, they were running prevue guide-like promos. Really early in the days of cable - they still only had 12 channels (instead of the usual 5 the market had) plus the Showtime box. It seems so quaint now, heh heh!
Wow a blast from the past. We had WHT for about a year and my dad even installed for them briefly. Anyone growing up in the NY-NJ-CT tri state area probably remembers their barrage of commercials during afternoon cartoons. Every few months the only thing in the add that would change was the price. I think it started at either $9 or $11/month and by the end was up to either $23 or $27.
My parents were trailblazers also renting VHS movies from Fotomat when that started at about the same time.
You can easily remove the rivet with a small drill bit that will just remove the rivet head and pop right out without any damage.
I've seen The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West before. It was edited from a TV show called Dusty's Trail. It really was just Gilligan's Island in the Wild West, down to the same character archetypes, all the way down to casting Bob Denver as Dusty, who's just Gilligan in a cowboy hat; Sherwood Schwartz was rather lazily repeating himself.
About the only notable thing about this show is that our Ginger and Mary Ann parallels (a saloon girl and schoolteacher, respectively) were played by Jeannine C. Riley and Lori Saunders, who played two of the Bradley sisters on Petticoat Junction, but were not on the show at the same time.
I ended up getting a cheapo DVD compilation of Dusty’s Trail for Christmas one year (the marvels of the $5 DVD bin at a Dollar General, I’m sure). I think you described it pretty well. As someone who was unfamiliar with Gilligan’s Island, it was a pretty passable example of the genre, but my suspicion is that Gilligan’s Island probably was better. I’d argue, though, that the wagon train conceit probably worked better than the desert island concept, both in terms of “why are these people even together” and “why doesn’t the professor just fix the boat or the radio”.
@@danthemainman1 The concept probably does work better in the Western setting, but at the same time, if you've watched Gilligan's Island, then Dusty's Trail is just a stale rehash.
I figured as much. I always suspected that the only reason I even sort of enjoyed it was that I’d never seen Gilligan’s Island. Makes me wonder how many other failed sitcoms that are basically ripoffs of a hit show (and feature the lead or a major supporting actor/actress) are floating around out there. Could be a good Archive episode in the vein of the Bad Syndicated Sitcom episodes.
When they say, "non user survivable" they mean it with all those rivets.
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. and recall OTA pay tv services before the distribution of cable TV in the outer boroughs. We received an HBO signal (paid service) though a roof antenna with a cable wire running down to our living room TV set connected to a small switch box on the back from 1982 - 1986. Just prior to cable tv service availability in our neighborhood. I remember the WHT service very well (commercials & school friends mentioning it) but unfortunately I never was able to watch.
ON-TV in Detroit did converter boxes with the speaker built in. My father says that's the reason why on the one tape he has with a transition from unscrambled WXON to ON-TV, the tape is silent until the movie ("Hopscotch," with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson) starts.
There was apparently a time when OnTV updated their boxes to play some sort of alert warning to signal pirates. Presumably the OnTV speaker was used at least for that sound.
On a technical level, I’ve always wondered how they managed that feat. Clearly the signal embedded the alert warning in some way, but extracting it (and detecting the pirate boxes) would have been pretty difficult back in the analog era.
@@danthemainman1 I know in Chicago at WSNS they did that, starting in '84. WXON had already dropped the service, by that time.
Hearing the movies arrive through that 3-inch decoder box PM speaker was like going to the outdoor drive-in and hanging the speaker box on your driver’s door window. Remember those days? Same effect.
Woah metco❤❤❤
we had one of those in the 70's and the antenna they gave you was a directional type on channel 68 in central new jersey way before cable. when we had it at a certain time the tv channel would go scrambled and the audio would advertise for the wht service and the box would descramble the signal and the movie audio come out of the box. not to long after that HBO came into being in our area and pretty much killed the service and was merged. then cable came out in the early 80's and killed the wht service all together.
You even made it work, that's pretty cool.
Anytime someone brings up Wometco... all I can think of is "UGAZZO HOME VISION!" from SCTV.
Wow blast from the past. WHT if you watched channel 68 you could sort of watch the movies, the scrambling if i remember suppressed the vertical/ horizontal holds.
Cable tv and HBO and such made it obsolete. If I remember they only scrambled at night, where they showed movies.
One of the issues was at the time UHF was low power and hard to get.
The other thing is that at the time there were plans for descramblers galore, some of them actually worked .
15:46 Having not watched ahead, I pause now to predict Robert Lippert directed at least 1 of the 2.
As far as New York City Metro area goes, as someone who’s found themselves there, I’d say you mostly called it. Mostly, the metro area is largely defined by public transportation. The five counties/boroughs of NYC, the two counties of Long Island, the five southern counties of New York (Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, and Orange counties), Fairfield County in Connecticut, and roughly the northern half of New Jersey (basically Monmouth and Mercer, and all the counties north - yes, including the areas closer to Philly than New York).
As for coverage of that fairly wide area, Montauk, out on the extreme end of Long Island, is actually closer to Boston by air than it is to NYC. While most transmitters are based out of NYC (and are on the WTC), coverage out to Trenton and especially Suffolk County on Long Island required fill in transmitters. I think that, historically, on Long Island, you’d either tune in WLNY (channel 55) or you’d make do with snowy VHF coverage from NYC or Hartford. Out towards Trenton, you probably had your choice of NYC VHF or Philly VHF. I’m about 5 miles away from the World Trade Center by air (so yeah, in Brooklyn), and, on a pair of unamplified VHF/UHF antennas, I can get all the high powered stations (the MeTV affiliate on VHF-Lo has some serious reception issues though, especially when airplanes fly overhead - seems to be multipath), and I can definitely get the low power stations on the WTC.
In the early 80s, I could definitely see someone in Brooklyn using Wometco Home Theater, I wouldn’t doubt that the cable TV rollout to Brooklyn would be very slow. And even a low power signal from 2 WTC would definitely cover most, if not all, of Brooklyn. So, much like non-cable pay TV in the first place, there is a brief period of time in the early 80s where Wometco would make sense there. Also, you’d probably also get coverage of Hudson County, NJ from 2 WTC (probably not as far as Newark, though). In terms of Manhattan, though, I doubt anyone was choosing Wometco over the legendary Sterling Manhattan Cable!
Of course, in the digital era, I’m pretty sure that, out as far as Montauk, you’re either using a fringe reception outdoor antenna, or you’re paying for cable/satellite (or maybe UA-cam TV or Hulu’s equivalent).
I remember going out the the hamptons as a kid. We got chs 3 & 8 from CT. We also got 10 and 12 from Providence. 6 was a mess. Sometimes 6 from philly or 6 from Providence
Ch 60 was crystal clear in Jersey City as i recall. 68 was weak in Hudson County
At first I was like "can you imagine paying for all of those TV services individually?"
Then I remembered all the streaming services I pay for individually...
In Europe they scrambled the video signal (luma, sync pulses and chroma out of sync) but left the audio intact (Germany) or mirrored the frequency band, so low frequencies became high and high frequencies become low (Canal+ France).
Later, a Pentium CPU was enough to decode this in software without any encryption key needed..... (-:
France wanted to ban TV receiver cards for computers because of this...
I asked Benny boy to find a WHT box during the SelecTV box episode back in September, he didn't disappoint!!! For me remembering Channel 68 by the late 80s WHT shut down and it became a Home Shopping Network affiliate.
I grew up in the bottom tip of CT and cable tv became available in 1983. My parents said basic cable was like $8 a month. Which puts $20 just a few years earlier in perspective.
There were many black-box versions of these and HBO back in the day
I had one of those back in 1982 -1984. Downfall to it as sound comes out of the box not the TV. If you had a VCR only picture can be recorded not sound as you hear garbled as they broadcast on side band for audio. Wometco also knows as WHT was broadcasted in New York City area on UHF channel 68 & Long Island & a little of Connecticut on channel 67 & New Jersey on channel 60. The box converted it to channel 3 & they installed a special antenna but you can use a standard UHF antenna as well but their antenna will not work on VHF. Cable TV was not in NYC till much later & primarily for them. OnTV & other services in other cities use the exact same box so it worked in Boston, Chicago also as long is the signal on the same UHF channels or near as you can open the box & change it. You need to turn box off to watch normal TV or it will override channel 2 & 4.
Serendipity strikes again! The other day, I was revisiting your video of your On TV decoder box and it mentioned WHT.
Thank you for covering this intriguing topic using actual examples of defunct Pay TV set top boxes!…this goes way back…there’s an informative article in the April 1952 issue of Popular Science entitled “Will You Pay for TV Shows?”!!...I appreciate your mentioning your other videos on Pay TV as I intend to watch them all at once!!!
Thank you Ben for the shoutout, greatly appreciate it. Must track down that Tom Tyler western, but it appears the less said about that Bob Denver vehicle, the better.
Given the dates on your Blonder-Tongue box, I suspect this may be how the signals were put together. They have a few more scrambling patents but they were filed after 1980. "US Patent for Subscription television decoder apparatus Patent (Patent # 4,163,252)"
Your demo was very thorough! My guess is that this was a very low budget design. It didn’t demodulate or modulate the signal which explains why it had an internal speaker, most likely using an audio subcarrier. It probably used a gated sync system for the video with the sync timing on another subcarrier and changed the sync level through RF means like an early CATV descrambler. I doubt these boxes were addressable - if you cancelled service you probably had to rerun or pay a very steep fee.
Later BTVision decoders (1981 and newer) were indeed addressable, and could be remotely deactivated from the programmer’s office computer. This addressability functionality also allowed pay-per-view events to run at additional costs for subscribers. Star Wars was a big P-P-V movie run on September 25, 1982 in many addressable subscription television markets.
In addition to WHT, the BTVision (B-T) technology was used by StarCase in Boston area, and also STAR TV in San Francisco area, and ON-TV in Detroit, MI. All of these B-T markets had initially launched non-addressable, meaning that if the subscriber’s monthly bill was not paid, their decoder would continue to function, until removed/disconnected by the program operator.
Blonder Tongue was a bit late to the addressability party. Zenith SSAVI was addressable on day one, and was used by the largest number of single-channel UHF subscription television outlets in the United States. OAK’s Sinewave system was also addressable on day one in 1977 in Los Angeles, CA. So much history.
I remember WHT when i was a.teenager. I lived in Jersey City and Channel 60 was crystal clear there. The speaker on the box was a major complaint by subscribers. FYI the original call letter for ch 68 was WBTB, Then it changed to WTVG. Then to WWHT.
I wonder if someone could jerryrig a set kind of like that, so you can "tune in" to a channel, and then have a switch that could switch through all the subchannels. That would probably be a project for someone who's far more clever with electronics than I am, however.
Also, I'm just imagining a Wometco Home Theatre higher up watching something like this from 1980 or something and just having his mind blown.
In the UK we had over the air pay TV, both analogue and digital. on analogue there was the BBC's BBC Select service, which I understand was a series of programs for specialist audiences that was broadcast overnight and designed to be videoed then watched later, later on digital we had ON TV/itv Digital which went bust as they couldn't compete with Sky's Digital satellite service, in both channel count and coverage, had paid way too much for football rights, plus the encryption being hacked early on. Later on their was Topup TV which again failed, this system could work with a Common Interface card in a normal digital TV or with one of their own boxes, again their were few channels and could only be received fro the main transmission sites. Also their Thomson made PVR was a "records when it feels like" box and only paid about £40 for the one I picked up for my gran refurbished from Topup themselves.
Whats next, a Tele1st box?
I'm certainly in favor of it.
Wht was scrambled for us viewers without a box with no dound at all. Because of fcc not slliwing curses over the air thats why the sound was on sideband . No music at all playing
No, actually there was a barker channel that played music and begged you to subscribe
WHT on WRBV channel 65 from Vineland, NJ did not have any barker audio nor any music playing when in the BTVision scrambled mode in 1982. I saw both SelecTV on channel 57 from Philadelphia and WHT on channel 65. Both were two different scrambling/descrambling systems. Channel 57 had a vertical line that stayed down the center of the screen, and channel 65 had vertical line that liked to stay on the right side of the screen.
Very interesting video!
Apropos of nothing, the “decode” label printed out of square under the knob is really messing with me.
Also the “Wometco Home Theatre” label. Sheesh.
Boy I was literally just watching the pay tv episodes when this came on my notifications.
I remember WHT commercials. It advertised frequently in the first half of the 1980s, but i didn't know anyone who had it at home. For a little bit more $ you could get cable, so i don't think moat people thought WHT was a good proposition. It disappeared quietly so I never knew channel 68 was the descendant till you mentioned it in your other video.
We got a new set in 1986 with a better tuner, which coincided with discovering 68. It had music videos and wrestling, the two of the top 4 things a 5th grader cares about. 😅 good ride until it converted to a home shopping network.
Looks like a simple Logic chip in there, no need for a microprocessor or microcontroller.
There was a time when my TV had clear output of WHT sound without a box , and i went to another tv in the house, that tv didn't have the sound of what was playing.
Yep, likely towards the tale end of the WHT service life. Stereo television sets were able to receive WHT program audio and an encoded video picture. We did not need the WHT decoder box to hear sound. Blonder Tongue actually requested that the FCC delay analog stereo broadcasting for five years in the mid-1980’s until the BTVision operators could depreciate their decoders.
Ben great to see you doing a full show on WHT- When I lived in Long Island, subscribed to it and thought it was better than the cable movies channels at the time because the entire month would be revealved the 1st week for all the films they had that month- They installed a UHF Yaggi antenna and decoder box, so that it would transfer to channel 3- hence the toggle switch, so when you toggeld to the WHT side you would receive the UHF channel in your area converted on channel 3, When WHT was scrambled, you would turn down the TV volume and turn up the decoder volume, Initially WHT aired at 8pm-2am each night and also scrambled for 2 hours in the morning that is when installers would be doing most of there installs, eventually WHT went to 22 hours of broadcasting each day with movies,sports, concerts, adult programming (Which was called nightcap and was ala-carte) and WHT was also sold by Sears as well during this time - the good old days
That one green part in the box: Early Atari 2600's have what looks like the same part in red.
I lived in Chicago and NJ so, seen it all
Curiously enough, there was an On TV service in the UK... sort of. It was actually known as On Digital, which began in 1998 and was more famously - and notoriously - known as ITV Digital in 2001. Like its predecessor it also had a three-year life span before transmogrifying itself into the Freeview digital terrestrial TV platform which is still going to this day. For the time being, that is...
Over-the-air pay TV has always seemed weird to me, it was never a thing here in Canada, pay channels were always cable only. I know New Zealand (a country that never really got cable) had a pretty big OTA pay-TV system in the 90s and 00s, with multiple channels (some were multiple channels on time-sharing schemes). I think parts of Europe still have digital over-the-air pay tv.
I actually have a scan of an instruction manual for a South African M-Net decoder from the 80s (based on an Oak reference design I think) that talks about tuned antennas, and has a table of all the different transmitters and the required types of antenna for each one.
I like this channel. It’s like Technology Connections, only not hosted by a smug guy with a documented history of assault who has been credibly tied to multiple missing persons cases in the Midwest.
hua ?
Just drill out a rivet.
Did the signal require the wire parabolic dish? I remember those antennas all over queens.
"Dusty's Trail"? You got to be kidding me.
I'm a bit of an old school sports tape trader so I have a lot of recordings of ota ppv. I have a lot of on-tv stuff. This boxes audio presents a problem in recording given the audio is not on the coaxial. The only remaining relics of these companies beside the rare box that survived are the recordings.
i hacked ch 68. i got sound using my radio close to the tv, by tuning to dead spaces. you could sort of get unscrambled but reverse color if you had the dial in-between the channel 68-69
Nice.......i lived in the bronx, and you could tell who had what by the attena hung outside their window. WHT was more (yagi) , and HBO looked like a dish type. There is no online capture of WHT Content , i guess it's because how small market it was + no way to hook up to VCR
When I was a kid in the NYC area in the 1980s, we had a nearly identical box and what I remember to be a "dish like" antenna on the roof to receive HBO. I've been trying to find a photo of the exact antenna we had with no luck. I was starting to think I imagined it.
@@alobodig We received HBO through a roof top antenna that was connected to our living room TV via cable and a small switch box in the back. I distinctly recall when it was set up. This was before cable TV availability in our area of Brooklyn.
Music reminds me of blade runner.
Did you attempt calling the service # on the back? That would've been an interesting conversation.
@frankv7774 - It is the same service telephone number listed for CT and for NY,NJ.
Nice demo Ben. As far as the BT box, and as some whom had commented about it, ON-TV in Detroit (under the Chartwell franchise) utilized these boxes back in the day, specifically from '79 until '83. I vividly remembered one of our neighbors on our block had showed me how it worked.
When ON was off, the signal going through the decoder was that of an unscrambled WXON feed. At 8 PM, when "TV20" transitioned to ON-TV, the signal was scrambled with the main audio totally muted, save for the TOH station Id. In order for the box to work and for a subscriber to get programming, the setting had to be switched from "TV" to "ON", and of course, the volume turned up and the fine tuning knob manually adjusted to remove the scramble. As for audio, it came out the box, but it sounded very inferior - just like you would have audio coming out of a B&W set. The first (and only) time I actually watched legal ON-TV; the programming that night was a Red Wings NHL hockey game.
This blew me away. My dad along with his friend had IT-TV. They used a simple, yet addressable Zenith SSAVI decoder and their transition to its outsourced SelecTV content was both automatic and seamless.
@RonfromMichigan-sj4ux Yes, ON-TV/Chartwell Communications/T.A.T used the same BTVision technology in Detroit, MI on channel 20. There was not barker channel audio, nor music played. Only an audio top of hour station identification over the main audio channel heard for anyone trying to watch the scrambled video. An interesting story was why the OAK Sinewave technology was not used for Detroit’s ON-TV market launch. Martin Sperber invented the BTVision system in 1972, having worked for Blonder Tongue at the time. Then Sperber later became technical consultant for Chartwell Communications, and that is how his system was chosen over the OAK Sinewave system used in ON-TV’s other markets (Chicago, Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles, Dayton).
Its crazy how much they'd spend for a simple home movie channel back in the 80s. Was going to the movies really that awful?
What happened to the intro with the music? Haven't seen this channel in a while
Still used on most of the whole number episodes.
Wait🤔your WHT cable box still works and you can watch movies on it in 2024?????😲🤔
Not really. The WHT box simply passes VHS signal through it - so the box still “works” - but nobody “can watch movies on it”.
You could make the audio come through the decoder’s speaker today by getting your hands on a BTSC analog television stereo encoder (such as Blonder Tongue BTSC stereo encoder, or television modulator on UHF channel 60 with the BTSC stereo encoder built-in). You would connect the monaural audio from your VHS recorder out-of-phase into both the left and right channel inputs of your BTSC encoder/channel 60 UHF modulator). BTVision used the same modulation and line frequency in 1977 that was later used by Zenith for their analog BTSC format stereo technology development in 1984. There were differences with how the audio was modulated on that subcarrier, as dbx compandor was added to the BTSC format to reduce the high frequency noise on the recovered stereo, especially in “fringe” signal reception areas. Yes, folks the BTVision program audio was placed on a 31.468kHz double sideband suppressed AM subcarrier, the same frequency as used by analog stereo television in the United States.
One of the first 1,000 here watching
1:30 At least Wometco had the *good sense* to *correctly* spell *theatre* on the control panel, instead of the corrupted spelling Americans usually write, "theater"!