SPOTLIGHT Pay TV - Rare Intro and Channel ID From 1982

SPOTLIGHT Pay TV Feature Presentation into with a PG rated notice and a channel ID tag.

SPOTLIGHT was a short-lived U.S. Pay TV cable channel which operated from May 1981 until February 1984. It couldn't survive once it's competitors (HBO & Showtime) started acquiring exclusive film licensing contracts.

But Spotlight was a neat little underdog channel, which we got free from our cable system because the old turn dial cable boxes let us pick it up on the channel between the first and last #'s on the turn dial converter box, which was supposed to be dead space.

Eventually, our cable company (Storer Cable - one of the four main investors in the struggling pay channel) began realizing this glitch and in Fall of 1982 they began requesting that customers bring in their converter boxes to their office and exchange for a brand new new digital one. Of course, the cable company wasn't admitting to the real reason, and just said that it was so that they could offer more channels in the future and there were hints of things to come, like pay per view (which our town didn't even get until the early 90s).

The old converter boxes were cool because they would allow you to pick up some of the random satellite feeds to channels that weren't offered by our Cable co, like another pay channel called HTN (Home Theater Network - infamous for not showing anything above a PG rating), and sometimes the HBO West coast Satellite feed would be broadcast in the AM hours.

So, I had begged my parents to hold off until the cable office's deadline date because I knew what they were really doing, and we were going to lose Spotlight and the other little surprises.

These notices regarding the swap were posted on the bulletin board channel, and there was one announcement later on that was like a threat to customers, saying that time was running out, and if customers didn't turn your box in by such and such date, they would start going around to knock on doors, cutting service, etc. Hmmm.. it sort of reminds me of the tactics that they used with the vaccines ("Our patience is running out"). Ha Ha.

The other big change and reason that they wanted people to upgrade was because you could watch the pay TV channels that you didn't subscribe to with scrambled video, but full audio. The new digital converters corrected all of this and would switch to a snowy signal a second or two after switching to the channel. However, I remember my friends and I still had a way around that; you could just keep hitting the converter box's recall button and it would keep switching to the channel. Yeah, it was sad, tedious and desperate, but hey, that's what kids did back in those days with limited options.

Note: I do not own this video. I am posting it for entertainment, nostalgic and historical purposes only.

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