One of the neat things about Jones Spacelink was Ch.2 - ME/U - Mind Extension University. That was about the time when they finally grouped the locals together on the lineup. KTFH, KXLN & KTMD, I think, were only added to the lineup in the early 90s, like around 1991 or 92. The game for the former 2 was to always see if you could make out ANYTHING that was happening, which happened to varying degrees of success. At some point in the mid or late 90s, The Disney Channel was added to the basic lineup. I don't think it was MTV that was scrambled as it was always available at my house from what I remember, and my parents didn't pay for any of the premium channels until later, when they bought a converter for Disney Channel.īack in the late 80s & early 90s, Ch. Jones-Spacelink (served Rosenburg, and scrambled MTV via phone line) What areas of town? In Sugar Land (First Colony) we had TCI until around 97 or 98 when Time Warner took it over, the Comcast took over that when they took over Time Warner in Houston.Ĥ. Time Warner did not add digital until at least 2002 at the house we moved to.įor info about satellite, look at the national services like Direct TV, they are all national providers. You could only get 1 cable box, and they also deleted 10 analog channels in order to provide the 80 or so digital ones. In 1998 we moved to an apartment complex served by TCI, they were offering the "innovative" new digital cable which we had for 6 months. Only problem is that they forgot to bill anyone, so everyone got all of the premium channels for years before they tore down the satellites. Originally when we moved there, the landlord ran their own proprietary cable company, they had like 10 huge satellites on some adjacent land. They merged a few times, I think before that it was called "OpTel". One apartment we had Phonoscope for a while. Prime Cable was a system I remember growing up in the 90's. Judging from the Wikipedia article on Phonoscope Communications, and the HBJ piece on Lee Cook referenced in it, I'd bet it's the same company. I see trucks with the name Phonoscope on the side around Houston from time to time, but I doubt it's the same company. No wonder it died after only a couple of years. The DJ camera came on when we opened the mike to talk, and when we weren't talking, viewers - if there were any - could see the name of what we were playing. (now KMJQ Majiq 102) In addition to carrying our radio signal, they put two small wall mounted cameras in the control room, one pointed at the DJ, the other at an easle where we put the album cover of the record we were playing. They did a gimmicky cross promotion with the easy listening FM radio station I worked at down the hall, KMSC 102.1. Most of the time it just showed old movies, and when the movie ended the screen went blank. The studio was in the old Nassau Bay Professional building on Upper Bay Road, and it operated only sporadically because Phonoscope didn't have people there running it all the time. The system was named Phonoscope, and it was a flop because NASA never put much of its info on the cable. I believe the thinking was that since everybody who lived there worked for NASA or a NASA contractor, residents could have access to important NASA information and notices by just turning on the TV. I don't know if it was the first of its kind around here, but in the early 60s when NASA was moving in and Nassau Bay was coming into existence, somebody came up with the idea of a "Community Antenna TV System" (CATV) and every home there would be connected to it by cable.
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