Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Future of British television | Cable Television | British TV | TV Eye | 1982" video.
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Wow! All the way up to 30 channels!?! As an American, I've never unstood British television. By 1982, an average size American city had 8-15 over the air (OTA) channels. There were three main networks and then a bunch of local channels and second tier networks, as Fox was when it first started up. There's just no concept of a national TV channel like BBC, and certainly no concept of paying for a TV license. Unfortunately, most places have only one franchise cable company, so we became more like Britain in that regard. This kind of monopoly has lead to some cable providers to charge $50-$70 per month for just basic cable of 30-40 channels, and those that are real addicts can spend hundreds per month for hundreds of channels. The good thing is the switch to digital has allowed any OTA channel to have 2-4 subchannels, so now there can be more than 50 OTA channels. As the number of channels expanded, we have been inundated with home shopping channels, weird religious programming, and movies no one would ever want to watch again. It's interesting that the concept of an internet at a line per second was looking into the hazy future.
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@pit_stop77 There was actually. The 60's and 70's were kind of the golden age if US television. We had everything from comedies Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners and Lucille Ball, variety shows like Ed Sullivan, and serious programs like 20th Century and Hallmark Theater. We even adapted some British programs to become shows like All In The Family, and I watched Fawlty Towers and Monty Python religiously. I was a kid/teenager in the 50's and 60's and it was rare not to have at least a couple programs of interest every evening. There were also local programs like Ghoulardi and his terrible but funny science fiction movies from my hometown of Cleveland that became regional favorites.
Every station put on local news and weather. The idea of tuning into one channel for the news of the entire country followed by maybe two minutes of weather for the whole country was completely foreign to me. Local news generally lasted a half-hour followed by a half-hour of national news from one of the Big Three networks. Fox and CNN got their starts by providing news programming to non-network statons. My impression from watching reruns of BBC news, even into the 90's, was the British were satisfied with maybe 20 minutes of a just the biggest national and world stories and maybe a story or two that was local to their service area. Americans, by comparison, wanted detailed local news as well as national news. In particular, we wanted detailed local weather, with some weather segments running fifteen minutes, and weathermen becoming local celebrities. Stations commonly competed on the quality of their news and weather, and people would watch programs before or after their favorite local news, thereby selling more ad time.
Most US station were operating until about 0200 in the 60's, and almost all were 24 hours by the 70's. It was mostly really old movies or cooking shows late night, but at least you had something on that would put you to sleep if you had insomnia. :-)
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