80’s Cable TV: On-TV

A couple of weeks ago my friend pointed out to me that me and my family where the only ones on the block who had cable in the 80’s. “You guys had ON-TV” he pointed out.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Ontvlogo.jpg

ON-TV was a subscription television service, also known as National Subscription Television, launched in 1977 by Oak Industries, Norman Lear’s Chartwell Enterprises and Jerry Perenchio. Oak was a manufacturer of satellite and pay-TV decoders and equipment. ON-TV operated in major markets such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.

ON-TV was one of many “scrambled UHF” services in many major markets around the country in the era before multi-channel cable television became widely available. Others included SelecTV, Prism, Starcase, Spectrum, Preview, VEU, and SuperTV.

ON-TV, like other PayTV networks, aired a mixture of movies, sports events, and concerts. For example, the Los Angeles-area service showed many home games of the Los Angeles Dodgers, California Angels, Los Angeles Lakers, and Los Angeles Kings, as well as some of the era’s biggest championship boxing matches. In Chicago, ON-TV aired Chicago White Sox, Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks games (which eventually migrated over to a second ON-TV owned station, Sportsvision.)

ON-TV not only aired mainstream films, but much like Z Channel, also aired more unique films and concerts, featuring such acts as Talking Heads and Siouxsie and the Banshees. ON-TV also opted for a uniquely New Wave and heavy metal-dominated music video lineup between films, including acts that MTV and other video shows often ignored, such as Oingo Boingo, Slade, Adam and the Ants, Devo, Men Without Hats, Rush, The Police, J. Geils Band, Wall of Voodoo and many others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ON-TV

We used to attempt to watch the Playboy channel by flipping the A/B selector back an forth quickly. It was ultra softcore but for an 9-10 year old in the 80’s it was might as well have been Hustler magazine. What is funny is that Hustler and the other hardcore stuff seemed over the top. It was more of a gross out oddity taken too far that defied description. But Playboy was just right.

Aside from the occasional “skin”amax or late night HBO, What we watched more that anything else was MTV. There was no MTV2 or Realworld or whatever else lame crap they pass for entertainment these days. In the 80’s, MTV meant MUSIC TV and they actually played MUSIC videos. Their competition was the Box who played back to back videos (I think that was the name.. could have been “video box” or “thebox”). Thevideobox (or whatever the name was.. I maybe thinking of Video Jukebox) never really got that popular and might have been a local phenomenon, because I googled it and can’t find anything on it… let me know if you remember it. MTV’s only other real competition was VH1 (VH-1: Video Hits One) that got big a little later.

What was really cool about MTV at the time is that they seem to be a young and daring group of artists running the channel however the hell they wanted. As such they were able to break new ground in all directions in art: music, video, stories, shows, movies, even animation. Mad geniuses like Peter Chung introduced new states of consciousness via strange pieces like Æon Fluxin the early 1990’s. MTV was able to popularize the music video genre and the avante garde fringes of art & culture stimulating a revolutionary progressive thought that was brewing within the newly arrived Generation X. Unfortunately, MTV/MTV2 is now just another part of the corporate/commercial landscape. Innovation and freething has been pushed to the Internet.

On-TV was a big factor in my GenX development. While might chalk this up as an entirely negative thing, I would respectfully disagree. I really believe that cable is a interesting part of the American cultural landscape. In the 80’s, channels like MTV helped to define the boundaries of our culture. Many hard line traditionalist and religious types were seriously critical of the redefinition of those boundaries, but no one (not even a particular religion) owns the rights to all ethical answers. Life evolves to fast for a single one-dimensional measurement of morality and reality.

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