Lawrence Sonntag regularly streams a 90s nostalgia program like this on twitch. He calls it Mediatek, and will use it as filler for his gaming streams when he is afk.
You can also get a digital TV antenna (< $100) since most of them are still being broadcast, somewhere. This gives you the FULL experience of having to know when the shows are "on." /s
Of course if you live in an apartment that may not work.
It's a whole other world out there! But yeah, you can get the big sporting events, e.g. some of the Women's World Cup matches (the ones the US team is in).
When I first connected it, I cycled through ALL the channels. There were about 800.
I don’t know about outside of the US, but “HDTV” in the US is on the same old vhf and uhf bands as their analog predecessors exempting some carve outs for cellular. The antenna lengths will be the same.
VHF has gone away in some areas, as I understand it. It is all gone in the Chicago metro area, now all HDTV is broadcast on UHF channels only. And thank goodness for that! For a while, CBS 2 Chicago was on VHF channel 12, and was limited in power. So the reception outside the city limits was rather poor, even for relatively close-in suburbs. They finally got 48.2 allocated, and that comes in much better, much further out. It was frustrating, because the other major & minor channels were already on UHF and came in fine.
Philly has one channel on VHF LO but thankfully the transmitters are in a great location so you don’t really need a huge antenna if you’re close to the city.
Nostalgia is so powerful. I'm fully conscious of it and yet I still couldn't resist losing 30 minutes to this without even realizing it. Spent some time channel surfing 1997, which was a fairly pivotal year for me.
I remember going to see Men In Black in 1997. I had a meltdown because I found the aliens scary, and my Mom had to leave the film early. My dad took my sister and he got to see the whole movie, which my mom resented.
In the UK, Men in Black was a PG when released. We had a "12" rating at the time, but that meant 11 year olds couldn't go to the cinema to see it, even with an adult present.
Independence day which came out a year earlier (also with Will Smith) was a 12.
The first ‘12’ general release was I believe for Batman.
I went to see that with my older, cool as fuck aunty who went to university, shaved her head and had a CAR.
All of that was cool as fuck to me.
I felt so grown up going to see that! I was not sure if adults ate sweets (candy) at the pictures so I declined her offer only to see everyone get a stuff!
Ah the pressures of growing up. Spend half your life desperate to be grown and the other half wishing you weren’t!
Sally later confided to me that no adult would go with her to see Batman. Comic book movies except Superman were very much not for ‘adults’ in late eighties Liverpool !
Going to New Orleans. Seeing Crash Worship. Met a girl there. With her best friend, all 3 of us climbed a huge, ancient tree. Watched the moon rise over the city.
Buying GoldenEye for the N64 on release day. For the first couple of weeks, being the only one of my friends to own it, but telling all of them how great it was. A week or two after that, one of my friends buying the game (and an N64 to play it on) and rapidly becoming better than me.
We and our other friends played almost every week for the next couple of years.
In my experience, it was fairly common for there to be (as an example) a channel 3 and a channel 5 but no 4, so if you were flipping through the channels on certain TV's you'd see static.
It was also a common experience for those of us who didn't have cable or satellite, with the only channels available being whatever came in over the air.
Even in more densely populated areas there were blank channels you'd flip through, and where I grew up there were only two channels that came in most of the time with another 1-2 that'd briefly become available at certain times of day or during specific weather where atmospheric conditions boosted the signal strength of those stations.
Except here, there is static before the content appears on the channel. Which is not the same as stumbling upon an empty channel.
Very old TV's did not have memorized channels, and so you had to tune to find the next channel, which would give you a progression to static and back.
Then TV had a memory for the channel frequency. It would switch instantaneously the video. So fast that sometimes you could see the first frame in black and white. Then color info would come (color TV is atop of black and white and spread over frames if I recall). Then mono sound would come in. Then stereo (like color, the stereo signal is an augmentation). Still all of that faster than any modern technology.
Then came digital TVs (still receiving analog TV signal) which could have a second or two of digital lag during channel change, but it wouldn't display static, simply a blank (dark) screen.
By the 90s everyone in the Northerhn hemisphere got a decent TV with instant
tuning. Once you tuned the channel and set it up to a button on the remote or the TV front panel, things went as fast as Linux switching TTY's todays. No joke.
Yes, I remember well when in 1990 they went door to door handing out brand new TVs...
Ahem. In the 80s I remember struggling with a set my grandparents must have bought in the late 60s to try to watch TV. It was like holding a seance for sitcoms. I expect plenty of people were still watching TV in the 90s on sets sold in the 70s and 80s. Maybe not the majority, but I wouldn't assume "everyone" had the current goodness.
Even my grandma's TV from the 80's had instant buttons to switch between channels but no TV remote. And, yet, the tuning was on the spot. No delays. Zero. Literally.
Yes, in broadcast (over the air) TV, only every other channel was allocated in a given area. That's why most devices that connected to a TV (computers, VCRs, etc.) could use either channel 3 or channel 4 because one of the two would be unused.
There were some exceptions, though, as the VHF TV channels aren't all contiguous. In North America, there's a gap between channels 4 and 5; and channels 6 and 7 are separated by the bands for several radio services (FM, aviation, amateur, and marine).
Yep, that was a thing with NTSC-M analog channel 6, which had the audio at 87.75MHz, just below the nominal bottom of the FM range at 88.1MHz. I used to listen to the 10 o'clock news that way.
ISTR we had 2,4,5,9,11, and 30 (UHF). Channels 2-5 were ABC, CBS, and NBC. Channel 9 was PBS, and 11 and 30 were local stations that weren't affiliated with any of the major networks.
That doesn't explain a thing. The "static" came from weak signals or not tuning properly. Before digital TVs were a thing, analog TVs already had digital tuners, and suppressed the display while switching channels. Analog TVs are not synonymous with static while changing channel.
Creator here. I add the static to mask the video buffering ( since each channel change triggers a video load ) I'm flattered though that you think of me as young. I very much was a child of the '80's :D
You could add a "high bandwidth & low latency" mode, where when active, you load the current video + the next one. So when the user goes to the next channel, it's already playing but muted and not visible, and you start playing the next-next channel hidden again :)
That depends on the type of TV! The old kind had a manual rotary switch, and you had to move through all intermediate channels regardless of whether a station was broadcasting there, so you could see static when switching.
For example, in my area, the main stations were at 4, 5, and 8. Switching from 5 to 4, I'd see no static because they're adjacent. Switching from 5 to 8, I'd see static while the knob was at 6 and 7.
The 60s, 70s, and 80s TV sets on the site are the style I'm talking about. The 90s and 2000s TVs aren't.
The best way to do it would be to use different transitions depending on the style of TV depicted. But the way they did it is not wrong for all analog TVs.
Ha! In the 80s I was the remote control. We had one of those TVs with rotary channel switch. And 7 year me had the important task of changing the channel whenever needed, and adjusting the antenna as well.
I was the family remote control for years. This often led to arguments because I'd stop on what I wanted to watch instead of what my parents wanted to watch. "I said turn to channel 5!" "But I want to watch 'The Hulk!'"
My teen complains about special effects in MCU shows sometimes. I'm like "I had to watch a bodybuilder painted green for superhero shows, and like it!" (RIP Bill Bixby...)
Not related but somehow it reminded me that I had one of those casio pocket tvs and felt so cool that I could watch a _very_ limited amount of TV while on the go mid-late 90s, and how I even managed to hook it up to our local cable with a homemade cable to get even more channels when at home. I'm so grateful I got to live through those times and been in a fortunate enough position to play with 90s gadgets like that.
I used to hide in the closet with one of those when my parents would argue, much easier to drown them out with headphones than just a tv by itself. Granted the selection was always something like Andy Griffith or primetime network. While the circumstances surrounding why I needed that little thing are terrible I'm still happy I had it and its still floating around in a box somewhere in my current home.
I'm surprised there aren't more full tapings of 90's television available, as in entire blocks of broadcasting with all the commercials intact. That was how most recording would have happened, and with the start of TV Land the networks should have been able to predict there'd be a market for it in 30 years.
Commercials have their own rights (and they often feature third-party music which, in turn, has its own rights). So, even if you have the rights to rebroadcast the actual program, you couldn’t show the original commercials without massive legal hurdles.
While I could see an issue with music rights, the commercial rights seem doable. I can't imagine them having a massive objection to "we'll show your commercial again for free."
Trying to set it up now seems nearly impossible, but if they planned for it then it may have been possible.
They do now that (pretending to) being offended offers a form of social currency. Had René Descartes been alive today he could have used Offendi, ergo sum as his first principle and not been far off the mark.
I think Descartes would have found the "offended at others being offended" niche a bit crowded today. Might have had to set his sights a bit higher than 'cancel culture'.
That's because the 90s were "peak freedom". I think partly because people were more "live and let live" and partly because social media did not exist yet, which is IMHO one of the causes of the current atmosphere of permanent outrage.
It was "peak freedom" in the sense of "freedom from consequence." The people who were targeted by the casual bigotry and homophobia of the time certainly weren't more "live and let live," they simply didn't have an outlet like social media to express their discontent at a scale that society could notice.
There are thousands of "commercials from 199X" compilations on Youtube, for pretty much every year from the mid-80s onwards. Some of those have been up for years.
Recording ~5 hours of television a night would have been a trivial cost for a network like NBC. Particularly compared to the licensing fees those hours would have had.
Which 5 hours? The programming transmitted by the network with few to no commercials, or the programming broadcast by hundreds of NBC affiliates, each with its own set of commercials paid for by local advertisers?
The storage costs wouldn't be a huge deal to either group.
In general, the affiliate nature would add a wrinkle to the whole thing, but not an insurmountable one. If nothing else, they could have used the broadcast from the affiliates they owned.
Viewers? As my hypothetical has them planning this in the 90's, they would have been aiming for cable licensing fees. TV Land was fairly successful, by 1999 is was outperforming MTV.
> The storage costs wouldn't be a huge deal to either group.
Broadcast-grade video tape cassettes were expensive even in bulk, and all tape requires climate-controlled archival storage since heat and especially humidity are quickly destructive to the adhesives that hold the magnetic layer to the substrate. (If you'd like more detail here, the term of art for this failure mode is "sticky-shed syndrome". While it's obviously more of a problem now than then, archival needs were understood at the time.)
Depending on format (Betacam SP or U-Matic), an open-ended commitment to preserving all programming would involve adding at minimum 2/3 to 1 cassette per hour of programming - more if you want multiple copies. So your running costs start out sizable and only grow over time, in search of a highly speculative payoff that at best won't be realized for years to decades.
Really. Tape media is bulky, expensive, prone to deterioration and the content back then started off low quality, so that deterioration takes a meaningful toll. Sure, a major corporation could afford to archive and maintain all of that material, but what's in it for them? A few thousand hours of repeating commercials and station promos?
Presumably it's not just the cost of storage media, but storage of the media too. Climate-controlled warehouses leased in perpetuity, archivists, security, and so on. To be clear, I don't think this is why so much of TV and movies (not to mention radio) is lost, I think that's just lack of foresight or different priorities. My point is, I don't think just buying a few thousand off-the-shelf VHS blanks would have solved the problem.
I'm working to digitize some old VHS tapes. It's not as easy as it sounds.
You've quite a few barriers to getting that stuff online.
1. Sure, someone taped 6 hours onto a junk tape of TV from some channel to catch one show. But then they likely taped over that, again and again.
2. Tapes are bulky. VHS in general and junk tapes in particular would have been viewed by most people as low value junk that was tempting to disposed of. That's especially true during the decade or two before nostalgia and retro-cool starts making old junk more desirable.
3. Tapes degrade. Even if someone kept them, they might not be readable and/or gum up the VCR you're trying to use to read them.
4. VHS digitization equipment is also old. Apparently newer capture cards aren't very good compared to older ones, and there are specialized devices to fix signal errors (TBCs), allowing capture cards to actually work, that are becoming hard to find and expensive.
5. It takes a lot of time. VCRs play tapes at 1x speed. So if you want to digitize a 6 hour tape, it's going to take at least 6 hours.
Find a good quality dvd recorder, sony made some great ones that can be thrifted for $10 or so. A good quality hifi 6 head VHS is about the same money.
Hook those up, record to DVD.
Rip DVD.
No need to fool with terrible capture cards they sucked back in the day and have not improved. The biggest problem I found with VHS is mold growth.
Edit: bonus with dvd recorders is that some have firewire ports so ripping portable video vamera tapes is automatic.
It might be apocryphal but I vaguely remember reading an article from the late-90s or early-00s where television executives were shocked that people wanted TV box sets. The logic was ... Why would people want to watch reruns? Whole swaths of soap opera episodes were totally lost, the masters being taped over, occasionally found in a box in some remote TV station.
I have a small personal project of cataloging all the movies that played on television in the 90s. There are tons of television shows that are not only not available on DVD or VHS but also seemingly no one has it. Double goes for cartoons, tons just totally unavailable. It is sad.
In many cases the original contracts on the shows didn't anticipate all the later viewing options. So to release the shows in a different format you have to get the actors, writers, music, etc all renegotiated.
Hence shows were wiped in the past (since they could never be shown again) and even surviving shows can't be released without a lot of work.
I've been working on it for about a year. At the moment it exists as a git repo (as you say), but for it to be of use you need at the very least the corresponding SqliteDB (~70MB) and to be really fun (and work with the frontend) you need the listing pages themselves (high res and ~50GB), neither of which is in the git repo, I keep them separate.
If you message me privately I'd be happy to share the data. The git repos are:
I use them for curation at the moment so the READMEs leave ... something to be desired. I hope by the end of August to have a read-only version up and running, although without a wikipedia-like effort I don't see how I would curate it fully so it'll probably always be a little touch and go as to what data is available.
The stats I have from curating are: 369345 individual movie "listing boxes" (I would guess around 98% accuracy, although if I were to field a guess the actual number there should be is probably 400K) of which 321308 are matched to a movie, and 296941 of those are for sure unique. And overall 202203 have channel + time + duration matched up using the VCR listings (which the New York Times conveniently published from around November 20th 1990, and the internet archive very nicely has the program the VCRs used to encode/decode those codes). There are 21530 unique movies at the moment.
If I understand the New York Times correctly, then none of this can be commercialized since I scraped the core data (the pages themselves) from the TimesMachine, so this really is a personal project, which I'm happy to share. I've made a few Letterboxd lists from the corresponding data, for example a series of lists with all of the movies (and play times) for films playing on September 1 in particular e.g. https://letterboxd.com/patsmad/list/television-films-septemb... It is rather consistent, around 100 films a day, for 1990-1999 it was 106, 118, 74, 74, 89, 99, 98, 110, 97, 93. As is obvious I can talk about this for days.
I'm not sure the best way to do private messages, my email is associated with this account, but I have no idea if you can see that. I usually just lurk on HN.
real world boston was the only reality tv show i watched more or less all the way through. it was fun while it lasted but once it was over, reality tv felt "done" and i didn't really want to watch much more of it. i still don't understand the lasting appeal tbh.
Reality TV and game shows are two different things. MTV's first game show (and first non-music programming) was "Remote Control" begun in the late 1980s.[1]
I used to watch regularly -- funny how I remembered the names of Colin Quinn and Kari Wuhrer, but couldn't remember the host's name without looking it up.
> I would argue Reality Shows are indeed a new form of low budget Game Show (someone is always trying to “win” something).
Reality competition shows are definitely a kind of game shows, but not all reality ahows are reality competition shows; MTV’s The Real World was not – nor was its loose inspiration, PBS’s An American Family. Expedition Robinson from 1997 (and the international version, Survivor, from 2000) really kicked off the reality competition format.
There is something extremely addictive about flipping channels on TV. I think it's the magic formula behind the popularity of TikTok. It's not "yet another social media app", it's TV re-invented.
I always did think that streaming services need to revive their format and bypass menu choice fatigue by letting you create "channels" by picking from shows/genres you like and then set you loose to channel surf.
I both like and am afraid of a system where you can just continuously flip to the next show or tv series, browsing by clip until you find something interesting and choose to roll back to the beginning of the episode. Netflix almost does this but it's not seamless enough due to the menu still being there and the variety of shows still being curated.
If you manage a decent sized video library at home, there are some options for self hosting an IPTV service that can then be accessed through Plex or etc.
You can set channel weighting distributions, add watermarks, schedules, practically anything that you’d want,
What options are these? I wouldn't ask but I've been googling for a few weeks to no avail. I keep finding options to set up IPTV from a broadcast source but not from files.
I think that's basically what TikTok got right. It's providing that experience in short form.
But similarly, Amazon has never properly captured the experience of simply browsing the curated shelves of a bookstore or library. I don't think any online service has.
I mean why can’t I shuffle the episodes of a show I’ve watched a hundred times? Why can’t I make a “playlist” of shows to share with friends? I really thought during COVID they’d finally implement stuff like that but nope
And the craziest thing is that every single new network or studio entrant just copies the same old format set up Netflix/Hulu ages ago, instead of trying to introduce any sort of innovation. Understandably, it's a tried and true standard but they could always introduce alternate modes for that sort of interactive viewing. Who knows, maybe they could drive greater engagement that way.
You'd expect lack of innovation from studios, but then why are Netflix or Amazon or Apple or Google acting so risk-adverse? Why aren't they trying anything new with the medium of streaming?
There's no innovation in streaming because there's no competition in streaming. There's no competition in streaming because the business model is about hoarding IP and tying it to the service that will provide the most money. The actual streaming service itself is ancillary.
If you want to see innovation in streaming you need the sort of legislation that prevents that tying. If every show was available on every streaming platform, then they would start to compete on offering the best streaming service and you'd start to see innovation. Right now, there's just no incentive.
Yeah it’s definitely very clear that they are outright hostile to user-determination. Seems like they have proven in testing that they can best maximize watch hours (or perhaps renewable) ONLY when the algorithm heavily influences what you watch (and by maximizing the number of exclusive series you start?), so it seems like they hide anything you’re already watching and push all their series at once.
It’s to my understanding that YouTube has been developing something in this vein; that’s currently being discussed with creators, to get them to select videos to be involved in the trials.
Linus talked about this recently on a LTT video. it sounds like they get to make a list of previous videos that air onto a 24-hour TV-like live broadcast. Not many details it sounded like and I'm not sure if you set the order or if YouTube decides. You can see the LTT one on the Live tab if you go to their page.
Google TV on Chromecast does that, kind of. I have a list of favorite free channels that I sometimes shuffle between. The channels themselves come from Plex, Pluto, freeve and Google TV itself.
ugh, no, i grew up without a TV but i had TV in my 20s. one thing i learned very quickly that flipping channels was a waste of time. instead i would study the TV guide every week and mark every show that i wanted to watch or if i would't be able to watch at the time, record, and then i never watched anything but what i had marked.
and ever since i have the ability to watch what i want any time because it's always available or i can download it, i do the same, but now i can choose when to watch without letting the TV dictate my schedule.
i don't know really how much it was back then, but not to much. there wasn't more than one or two shows in a day that i was interested in, often it was less, so maybe 5-10 hours per week?
i can tell you that now i spend an average of 1 to 1.5 hours per day watching movies, series or youtube. there are to many other interesting things to do that i also want to spend time on (like discussing on HN :-)
This was extremely common especially once cable boxes started to get more advanced guides and built in dvr. The TV guide just became a catalog of what you wanted to watch. All watching you'd do completely inside recordings. It was nice when they added their own episode catalog (on-demand I believe it was called, before we started calling it streaming) and would skip the dvr recording of an episode and go straight to their on-demand one. Or when you started watching something mis-show and the cable box would offer to restart from beginning from their on-demand offering.
Worth noting that, in some countries, TV guides published numeric codes for each programme. These codes could be punched directly into a video recorder to set up a recording (instead of having to manually select the channel, the date and the start/end times).
The only place I do this anymore in hotel rooms, although I'm usually foiled by how horribly slow this experience has become. I've stayed in hotels where it's up to 5 seconds between channels. This was a real sacrifice in the move to Digital Cable (although I recognize hotels have their own reasons for being extra extra slow).
Thank goodness whoever built these dog-slow hotel systems is too incompetent to pull that off!
Although I wouldn’t put it past them to have 5 seconds of black screen, ad, 5 seconds of black screen, next channel.
> There is something extremely addictive about flipping channels on TV.
The worst is when the remote dies on you because somebody keeps forgetting to replace the batteries. So you have to sit a foot from the tv screen to manually flip the channels. Then you get yelled at by your parents because it's bad for your eyes. And now everybody, including your parents, is frying their eyes looking at a monitor or smartphone screen up close.
Loved seeing a commercial from Nestle drumstick with an attractive blonde slowly eating the ice cream bar in a very sexually charged manner. Won’t see that in todays media. That’s the generation I grew up in.
And people wonder how the USA ended up with a president that sexually assaults women, boasts about sexually assaulting women, and pays hush money to porn actresses!
> Won’t see that in todays media. That’s the generation I grew up in.
Oh come off it. Sex still sells. Sexualized ads are still around, and they're always controversial. They were controversial in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and they're controversial today. If there was one thing Tipper Gore and Laura Bush agreed on during the 1990s, it was that media was too sexual and violent.
Already lived it, don't really need to do it again.
But I did it anyway and it's interesting to see the complete shift in tone from pre-9/11 to post-9/11 coverage. Everyone was so positive and excited pre-9/11 despite the fact that we were already plummeting into a recession.
One of my billionaire fantasies was to one day archive all of TV Guide and then use that to line up airing blocks for each decade at the start of every decade and then have it available as a streaming option.
TV Guide is tough. You have over 100 broadcast markets, each of which got their own magazine essentially, but before widespread adoption of ISSN, so even keeping track of which is which is tough. And the supported markets changed over the years too, so even if you figure it out for say 1984, in 1985 it's all mixed up again.
Then, most of these are missing. Archive.org's collection is thread-bare. For most calendar dates they only have one, and which market it is for is just random (though, it favors the big ones... California, NYC/NJ, etc).
After that, each page of listings is just bad. It's not as easily OCRed as more traditional multi-column magazines. The listings often don't make mention of which episode is being re-run, title only quite often. This affects afternoon cartoons on UHF quite a bit, since they'd do alot of the short film Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. You don't get any information on pre-emption at all. No sports-going-in-to-overtime or President-Reagan-has-an-important-announcement-about-the-commies. Daytime soaps can probably be pieced together just from the date (but that isn't perfect over long stretches and mixups accumulate, the NY Times lost track of their issue number and by the time they noticed they were off by 5000).
Hell, I wonder how many different edited-for-tv edits of movies there are, for at least a few there might be more than one because there's more reasons to do it than just bleeping out profanity.
I have a bit of this information. I can get into the specifics if you like but I've parsed the entire 90s tv listings from the New York times.
It is pretty comprehensive and obviously it keeps the same market (NY). On your last point yeah the amazing thing is just how variable the length of movies are. Also just how many there were! Over 26 thousand unique films played on the 60ish channels in the New York Times in the 90s. Around 100 a day. Some films have like 40 votes on IMDb and played 20 times on television.
26,000? Like... I estimate that out of Hollywood, we've gotten fewer than 100,000 since the dawn of film. I'm impressed. But the NYC broadcast market was second only really to LA itself.
Actually I had a bit of a brain fart, it is actually 21K, not 26K so a bit less.
There is at least 100 different films from every year from 1931 to 1999 it looks like (obviously many more from the 80s and 90s). But even just considering that, that's 7K as an absolute minimum. With straight-to-video and TV films the 90s peaked with ~850 unique films from 1995 alone playing on television. And to just give an idea of the level of obscurity, the median IMDb vote count for 1995 is 500, so half are on the level of something like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122968/ (which yes, played 7 times, mostly on TMC in March of 1996). Also once you get very obscure things get all muddled. Like with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112363/ which is marked as 1995 but certainly appears to have played once on television in 1991 so IMDb is wrong in this case. And of course there are a number of mistakes due to titles matching which I'm slowly correcting.
There are some caveats. This guy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222755/, played 6 times, but on channel 41 (which at the time was Spanish language maybe?), so it has 0 votes on IMDb, but played 6 times on television, which is odd but not unheard of. But you do have to consider that this is using a slightly larger range of channels (some specific to the New York region, like CUNY and MSG) than one might expect. I would guess though that maybe 40% of films play on TCM, SHO, MAX, or HBO ultimately though. Most channels didn't play movies ever outside of primetime.
When/if you get around to it I'm basically already in the process of doing this (although just for the fascinating dataset of knowing all the movies that played on television in the 90s, when, and how often). TV guide is tough. The New York Times has the TimesMachine though and those have very comprehensive television listings. Possibly as comprehensive as the TV Guide which I was surprised by.
Sure. I don't know how best to go about that though. I have my email associated with this account, but since I lurk I don't know if that is public or anything. Does HN have a PM system at all?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadhttps://www.toonamiaftermath.com/schedule
You can also get it running in Plex (requires Plex pass) with these two projects:
https://github.com/chris102994/docker-toonamiaftermath
https://github.com/xteve-project/xTeVe
https://www.toonamiaftermath.com
I didn't remember it having so much filler though.
twitch.tv/sirlarr
Of course if you live in an apartment that may not work.
http://users.wfu.edu/matthews/misc/dipole.html https://www.w9dup.org/technet_files/folded_dipoles_vhf_uhf_y...
UHF only goes up to channel 52 now, though. Before 2009 it went up to channel 70, and before 1983 UHF went all the way up to 83.
When I first connected it, I cycled through ALL the channels. There were about 800.
I was 5.
Independence day which came out a year earlier (also with Will Smith) was a 12.
I went to see that with my older, cool as fuck aunty who went to university, shaved her head and had a CAR.
All of that was cool as fuck to me.
I felt so grown up going to see that! I was not sure if adults ate sweets (candy) at the pictures so I declined her offer only to see everyone get a stuff!
Ah the pressures of growing up. Spend half your life desperate to be grown and the other half wishing you weren’t!
Sally later confided to me that no adult would go with her to see Batman. Comic book movies except Superman were very much not for ‘adults’ in late eighties Liverpool !
We and our other friends played almost every week for the next couple of years.
Even in more densely populated areas there were blank channels you'd flip through, and where I grew up there were only two channels that came in most of the time with another 1-2 that'd briefly become available at certain times of day or during specific weather where atmospheric conditions boosted the signal strength of those stations.
Very old TV's did not have memorized channels, and so you had to tune to find the next channel, which would give you a progression to static and back.
Then TV had a memory for the channel frequency. It would switch instantaneously the video. So fast that sometimes you could see the first frame in black and white. Then color info would come (color TV is atop of black and white and spread over frames if I recall). Then mono sound would come in. Then stereo (like color, the stereo signal is an augmentation). Still all of that faster than any modern technology.
Then came digital TVs (still receiving analog TV signal) which could have a second or two of digital lag during channel change, but it wouldn't display static, simply a blank (dark) screen.
Ahem. In the 80s I remember struggling with a set my grandparents must have bought in the late 60s to try to watch TV. It was like holding a seance for sitcoms. I expect plenty of people were still watching TV in the 90s on sets sold in the 70s and 80s. Maybe not the majority, but I wouldn't assume "everyone" had the current goodness.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/VHF_Usag...
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, and UHF 30.
I also remember that depending on the radio, you could sometimes pick up the audio for I think VHF channel 6 at the low end of the FM dial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television
For example, in my area, the main stations were at 4, 5, and 8. Switching from 5 to 4, I'd see no static because they're adjacent. Switching from 5 to 8, I'd see static while the knob was at 6 and 7.
The 60s, 70s, and 80s TV sets on the site are the style I'm talking about. The 90s and 2000s TVs aren't.
The best way to do it would be to use different transitions depending on the style of TV depicted. But the way they did it is not wrong for all analog TVs.
My teen complains about special effects in MCU shows sometimes. I'm like "I had to watch a bodybuilder painted green for superhero shows, and like it!" (RIP Bill Bixby...)
Trying to set it up now seems nearly impossible, but if they planned for it then it may have been possible.
Recording ~5 hours of television a night would have been a trivial cost for a network like NBC. Particularly compared to the licensing fees those hours would have had.
In general, the affiliate nature would add a wrinkle to the whole thing, but not an insurmountable one. If nothing else, they could have used the broadcast from the affiliates they owned.
Broadcast-grade video tape cassettes were expensive even in bulk, and all tape requires climate-controlled archival storage since heat and especially humidity are quickly destructive to the adhesives that hold the magnetic layer to the substrate. (If you'd like more detail here, the term of art for this failure mode is "sticky-shed syndrome". While it's obviously more of a problem now than then, archival needs were understood at the time.)
Depending on format (Betacam SP or U-Matic), an open-ended commitment to preserving all programming would involve adding at minimum 2/3 to 1 cassette per hour of programming - more if you want multiple copies. So your running costs start out sizable and only grow over time, in search of a highly speculative payoff that at best won't be realized for years to decades.
You've quite a few barriers to getting that stuff online.
1. Sure, someone taped 6 hours onto a junk tape of TV from some channel to catch one show. But then they likely taped over that, again and again.
2. Tapes are bulky. VHS in general and junk tapes in particular would have been viewed by most people as low value junk that was tempting to disposed of. That's especially true during the decade or two before nostalgia and retro-cool starts making old junk more desirable.
3. Tapes degrade. Even if someone kept them, they might not be readable and/or gum up the VCR you're trying to use to read them.
4. VHS digitization equipment is also old. Apparently newer capture cards aren't very good compared to older ones, and there are specialized devices to fix signal errors (TBCs), allowing capture cards to actually work, that are becoming hard to find and expensive.
5. It takes a lot of time. VCRs play tapes at 1x speed. So if you want to digitize a 6 hour tape, it's going to take at least 6 hours.
Hook those up, record to DVD.
Rip DVD.
No need to fool with terrible capture cards they sucked back in the day and have not improved. The biggest problem I found with VHS is mold growth.
Edit: bonus with dvd recorders is that some have firewire ports so ripping portable video vamera tapes is automatic.
I have a small personal project of cataloging all the movies that played on television in the 90s. There are tons of television shows that are not only not available on DVD or VHS but also seemingly no one has it. Double goes for cartoons, tons just totally unavailable. It is sad.
Hence shows were wiped in the past (since they could never be shown again) and even surviving shows can't be released without a lot of work.
Any plans to publish this list? Would surely make a super interesting git repo for example...
If you message me privately I'd be happy to share the data. The git repos are:
https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings-app
I use them for curation at the moment so the READMEs leave ... something to be desired. I hope by the end of August to have a read-only version up and running, although without a wikipedia-like effort I don't see how I would curate it fully so it'll probably always be a little touch and go as to what data is available.
The stats I have from curating are: 369345 individual movie "listing boxes" (I would guess around 98% accuracy, although if I were to field a guess the actual number there should be is probably 400K) of which 321308 are matched to a movie, and 296941 of those are for sure unique. And overall 202203 have channel + time + duration matched up using the VCR listings (which the New York Times conveniently published from around November 20th 1990, and the internet archive very nicely has the program the VCRs used to encode/decode those codes). There are 21530 unique movies at the moment.
If I understand the New York Times correctly, then none of this can be commercialized since I scraped the core data (the pages themselves) from the TimesMachine, so this really is a personal project, which I'm happy to share. I've made a few Letterboxd lists from the corresponding data, for example a series of lists with all of the movies (and play times) for films playing on September 1 in particular e.g. https://letterboxd.com/patsmad/list/television-films-septemb... It is rather consistent, around 100 films a day, for 1990-1999 it was 106, 118, 74, 74, 89, 99, 98, 110, 97, 93. As is obvious I can talk about this for days.
I'm not sure the best way to do private messages, my email is associated with this account, but I have no idea if you can see that. I usually just lurk on HN.
No more paying actors, script writers (at least, not at the same level), etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd1gqLVHZWo
I used to watch regularly -- funny how I remembered the names of Colin Quinn and Kari Wuhrer, but couldn't remember the host's name without looking it up.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Control_(game_show)
Reality competition shows are definitely a kind of game shows, but not all reality ahows are reality competition shows; MTV’s The Real World was not – nor was its loose inspiration, PBS’s An American Family. Expedition Robinson from 1997 (and the international version, Survivor, from 2000) really kicked off the reality competition format.
https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html
You can set channel weighting distributions, add watermarks, schedules, practically anything that you’d want,
https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv
But similarly, Amazon has never properly captured the experience of simply browsing the curated shelves of a bookstore or library. I don't think any online service has.
If you want to see innovation in streaming you need the sort of legislation that prevents that tying. If every show was available on every streaming platform, then they would start to compete on offering the best streaming service and you'd start to see innovation. Right now, there's just no incentive.
Netflix, for example, basically just pushes the same 10-20 movies and series at you under different headings.
At one time you could browse by categories like "classic TV" but those seem to be long gone.
I think it always played me Friends episodes for some reason.
Except the channel is usually a single TV series with the channel looping through all seasons/episodes.
Great for creating background noise from reruns of shows you’ve already watched.
and ever since i have the ability to watch what i want any time because it's always available or i can download it, i do the same, but now i can choose when to watch without letting the TV dictate my schedule.
i can tell you that now i spend an average of 1 to 1.5 hours per day watching movies, series or youtube. there are to many other interesting things to do that i also want to spend time on (like discussing on HN :-)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_co...
The worst is when the remote dies on you because somebody keeps forgetting to replace the batteries. So you have to sit a foot from the tv screen to manually flip the channels. Then you get yelled at by your parents because it's bad for your eyes. And now everybody, including your parents, is frying their eyes looking at a monitor or smartphone screen up close.
Good times …
Oh come off it. Sex still sells. Sexualized ads are still around, and they're always controversial. They were controversial in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and they're controversial today. If there was one thing Tipper Gore and Laura Bush agreed on during the 1990s, it was that media was too sexual and violent.
But I did it anyway and it's interesting to see the complete shift in tone from pre-9/11 to post-9/11 coverage. Everyone was so positive and excited pre-9/11 despite the fact that we were already plummeting into a recession.
I'd forgotten about that.
OK, that's not true. I regret plenty of things. But I don't regret time I wasted in my teens.
TV sucks these days!
One of my billionaire fantasies was to one day archive all of TV Guide and then use that to line up airing blocks for each decade at the start of every decade and then have it available as a streaming option.
Either way! Thank you so much for this!
Then, most of these are missing. Archive.org's collection is thread-bare. For most calendar dates they only have one, and which market it is for is just random (though, it favors the big ones... California, NYC/NJ, etc).
After that, each page of listings is just bad. It's not as easily OCRed as more traditional multi-column magazines. The listings often don't make mention of which episode is being re-run, title only quite often. This affects afternoon cartoons on UHF quite a bit, since they'd do alot of the short film Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. You don't get any information on pre-emption at all. No sports-going-in-to-overtime or President-Reagan-has-an-important-announcement-about-the-commies. Daytime soaps can probably be pieced together just from the date (but that isn't perfect over long stretches and mixups accumulate, the NY Times lost track of their issue number and by the time they noticed they were off by 5000).
Hell, I wonder how many different edited-for-tv edits of movies there are, for at least a few there might be more than one because there's more reasons to do it than just bleeping out profanity.
It is pretty comprehensive and obviously it keeps the same market (NY). On your last point yeah the amazing thing is just how variable the length of movies are. Also just how many there were! Over 26 thousand unique films played on the 60ish channels in the New York Times in the 90s. Around 100 a day. Some films have like 40 votes on IMDb and played 20 times on television.
There is at least 100 different films from every year from 1931 to 1999 it looks like (obviously many more from the 80s and 90s). But even just considering that, that's 7K as an absolute minimum. With straight-to-video and TV films the 90s peaked with ~850 unique films from 1995 alone playing on television. And to just give an idea of the level of obscurity, the median IMDb vote count for 1995 is 500, so half are on the level of something like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122968/ (which yes, played 7 times, mostly on TMC in March of 1996). Also once you get very obscure things get all muddled. Like with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112363/ which is marked as 1995 but certainly appears to have played once on television in 1991 so IMDb is wrong in this case. And of course there are a number of mistakes due to titles matching which I'm slowly correcting.
There are some caveats. This guy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222755/, played 6 times, but on channel 41 (which at the time was Spanish language maybe?), so it has 0 votes on IMDb, but played 6 times on television, which is odd but not unheard of. But you do have to consider that this is using a slightly larger range of channels (some specific to the New York region, like CUNY and MSG) than one might expect. I would guess though that maybe 40% of films play on TCM, SHO, MAX, or HBO ultimately though. Most channels didn't play movies ever outside of primetime.
I am unfortunately not notified when people respond, which is why I'm late to responding ;)
Please feel free to reach out to my burner e-mail hideitall@gmail.com and I will give you my preferred address.