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When TV Was Young c/o Reading Eagle
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readingeagle.com/article ··· id=54325Berks TV Cable Co. was granted a nonexclusive franchise in late 1963 to bring what was then called CATV community-antenna television to the Reading area.
Cable systems began in rural areas that either were too far from broadcast stations or geographically inaccessible to over-the-air signals. The earliest systems generally are credited to Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, and Astoria, Ore., where cable TV pioneers installed antennas on mountains and wired their communities.
Bruce E. Shaak, community programming manager for Comcasts Reading division, started with BerksCable in 1977. By then, it was owned by ATC, Denver, Colo., and was one of the 10 largest cable systems in the nation.
Shaak, 53, recalled the challenges of those earlier years, when it was difficult just keeping BerksCables 12 channels up and running.
"The biggest challenge was equipment," Shaak said. "When it got really hot or really cold, you had outages."
Another challenge was sending cable signals long distances because frequent amplifiers were needed to boost the signal. Shaak remembered when the company first ran cable from Reading to Wernersville.
"That was considered like a moon shot back then," he said.
The city resident also remembered the dilemma caused by the FCCs rules mandating which local stations the cable company had to carry.
"We had 15 channels we were obligated to carry and 12 channels to put them on," Shaak said.
The only solution was to have stations share channel space, he said, which sometimes led to customer complaints when automated equipment switched from one station to another in the middle of a late-running sports event or movie.
But BerksCable also acquired a national reputation for promoting locally originated programming, which Shaak credited to the late Earl W. Haydt.
Haydt became BerksCables manager in 1966, and worked to spread innovative ideas throughout the community, such as a local access channel and teleconferences among high schools, City Hall and other community sites.
BerksCable wasnt the only system building a local network. At one point, the county was served by as many as seven cable systems, including Service Electric Cablevision, which still has subscribers in a number of eastern Berks County municipalities.
By the late 1970s, technological innovations were allowing cable systems to expand their offerings. In 1987, BerksCable finished rebuilding its system to handle 60 channels.
Several mergers and acquisitions later, BerksCable was gone, its system under the umbrella of Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., the nations largest cable system with some 23 million subscribers.
Today, with a TV station for every niche interest, with cable and satellite systems offering 300-plus channels and TV signals transmitted to everything from computers to cell phones, its hard to imagine that half a century ago, television was little more than a novelty.
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What the article doesn't mention is...
BerksCable was also TCI, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T Broadband before it became Comcast.
I can remember when I was younger all of the premium services were trapped (even positive traps).
The first cable box I had was an SA8500. Yeah I saw the old switchboard style wood boxes but that was just a little bit before we had cable. The 8500 was merely a downconvertor with a 450 MHz tuner simple red led and small remote. There was another box that had a built in descrambler for call in PPV. This SA box had buttons on the top of it.
Later they added some more premium channels using scrambling (much easier than retrapping!) HBO2, Cinemax2 and Showtime were added. Prism was a premium channel under a trap on Ch 19 eventually became Starz. The SA8600 came out and had a simple channel name designation and a blue screen listing the upcoming pay per views when you first powered it on. It also had a volume control (unlike the previous ones) and it said "BEST STEREO" at one point on the bar.
We also had The Sega Channel for downloadable Sega Genesis video games.
Time Warner Cable started the upgrade to 750 MHz in 1998-99. AT&T Broadband finished it. Then it was "Advanced analog". 86 analog channels and SA8600X and 8610X converters with an on screen program guide.
It was announced in the paper when Digital cable was coming out. I believe this was in the summer of 2001. I went out that very first day with our 8610X analog boxes and picked up two DCT-2000's. They had a heck of a time at first. My bedroom box NEVER updated and received every channel until I moved to college a few months later.
Sometime after Comcast took over, you were no longer able to hear dispatch on the scanner radio. Now they use nextel's.
Share some of your local system's stories. It's been an interesting ride. I can remember it took them a LONG time to get 2-way working. They had return noise issues like crazy in our area.