And now the rest of the “legacy” cable channels - starting in 1980 where I left off, and arbitrarily cutting off in 1990.
BET
January 1980. I can’t say a lot about this one. Obviously my white ass is not the target audience for Black Entertainment Television - although even in its earliest days as a time-share block on USA, founder Robert L. Johnson spoke about the potential for bringing in a crossover audience. Judging from all the negative references to BET in The Boondocks it’s questionable how well BET served its target audience. As someone who’s never seen much of BET I can’t speak too much about its arc, or how far it’s strayed from its original ideas. I will say that it was an early example of a cable channel making a successful business of niche programming that certainly couldn’t sustain a broadcast network, or local independents in more than a few cities. (Another example: the Spanish International Network, now known as Univision, launched a national cable feed in 1976 to reach communities without the Hispanic population to warrant a full-time over-the-air Spanish channel.) And in the early days BET made an effort to produce original news and documentaries, proving cable wasn’t just for movies, reruns, and music videos - though of course BET had plenty of those too.
CNN
June 1980. This is one I can say a lot about. The rise of 24-hour cable news as how we watch The News and its shift in focus from factual reporting to a neverending stream of pundits opining and speculating has, it’s fair to say, made us worse off… but I’m not sure how much of that was CNN’s doing and how much was just market forces taking their course. Even before CNN there were satires like Network and Broadcast News that attacked the three networks as a malevolent, manipulative force, even with as relatively little airtime as they devoted to news…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before CNN launched, the three networks each had nightly 30-minute newscasts, a weekly hour-long panel discussion on Sunday mornings, some news coverage as part of the morning shows (which tended towards lighter fare), and the occasional “news magazine” like 60 Minutes for longer-form investigative reporting. For an important breaking story, the networks would cut into regular programming for ongoing coverage (and annoy lots of people expecting their regular shows) but for anything short of that, there was only so much time for each story.
Enter Ted Turner with the Cable News Network, and its promise of giving every story the time it deserved. Its older format had a few pundit shows, but most of the schedule was dominated by harder news reporting, both “top stories” and specialized business, sports, and entertainment shows. Probably its best-known personality was Larry King - and sure we mocked his silly questions and weird suspenders, but he was an interviewer who just interviewed and never made the show about his own politics. I’m not sure when was the last time anyone even tried that.
The only news experience Ted Turner had going in were the comedic Bill Tush newscasts on TBS - which ended so CNN could be taken seriously, but Tush ended up on CNN anchoring Showbiz Today for some years. In the ‘80s CNN was seen as amateurish, with its Atlanta-based crew of relative neophytes being mocked by the New York media establishment as the “Chicken Noodle Network.” The turning point was the 1991 Gulf War, when CNN could provide continuous coverage of unfolding events while the broadcast networks went back to regular programming. And I get that much - war coverage is where the cable news format really shines, an ongoing story that leaves viewers glued to the screen for hours at a time, good for ratings and prestige. The problem is that CNN tried to replicate it by treating every story as if it were as important as the Gulf War - the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton impeachment got the same wall-to-wall coverage where it wasn’t really warranted as the ratio of pundits to reporters crept up. Finally 9/11 changed CNN’s style for good: the news ticker introduced that dark day has been on the bottom of the screen ever since, while most of the specialized news programs were suspended and never came back.
In the meantime Fox News launched in 1996 and its unapologetically pro-Bush slant and brash personalities led it to surpass CNN in the ratings as the nation drifted rightward after 9/11. MSNBC, also a 1996 launch, struggled until it became the left wing Fox (circa 2010) and soon CNN was in third place. Having been beaten at their own game, CNN tried increasingly outlandish tactics to recapture their onetime relevance, like trying to turn the Malaysian Airlines disappearance into another wall-to-wall breaking news story. It’s a pretty sad ending for a network that used to live up to its motto of “The Most Trusted Name in News.”
Cinemax
August 1980. It may surprise you after all the jokes about “Skinemax” that Cinemax was mostly not a porn channel, and today it no longer shows any porn at all.
HBO founded Cinemax as a secondary channel to exclusively show movies - different movies from what HBO was showing any given week, at a time when rights weren’t exclusive to one company and Showtime often was showing the same stuff as HBO. So it made sense to subscribe to both channels, and HBO would sell you a double subscription as a package deal. It also made sense for cable systems with limited capacity to carry two complementary premium channels from the same company rather than redundant channels from competing companies, and this was probably a factor in the Showtime/TMC merger shortly after Cinemax started. Upgraded technology would eventually allow most cable systems to offer all four… as well as a third company’s competing Starz/Encore (1991) and dozens of digital subchannel feeds.
As for “Skinemax”… yes, Cinemax showed softcore porn late at night. But so did HBO and Showtime. Hell, so did USA, in edited form so as not to spook advertisers. But unlike those other channels, there was nothing else notable on Cinemax when the country already had three other pay-TV movie channels, and the network never had much in the way of non-pornographic original programming. (Apparently there were a handful of “Cinemax Original Series” for a couple of years. Researching this post is the first I’ve ever heard of them.) So although the nudity is long gone, it’s probably all Cinemax is going to be remembered for.
TLC
October 1980. Here we get to one of the sadder examples of network decay. In the 1970s the Appalachian Regional Commission distributed distance-learning courses via satellite to schools and colleges in its region. The success of this pilot program led to the 1980 foundation of the Appalachian Community Service Network, a nonprofit that launched The Learning Channel the same year, making courses available to cable systems as well as educational institutions. When government funding dried up, TLC went for-profit and, by the time I first encountered it in the early ‘90s, resembled PBS but with commercials and an even lower budget.
Obviously this inferior PBS wasn’t going to attract many viewers, and the rapid transition to trashy reality shows was probably inevitable to keep the network solvent - and is frequently brought up as a reason not to cut PBS funding.
Bravo
December 1980. Also started out as a PBS competitor, also ended up showing trashy reality TV. Bravo was initially a commercial-free premium channel focused on high culture - theatre, dance, opera, classical music - that would never fly on network TV. Turns out, the arts are no more profitable on television than they are in person, and all the orchestras and opera companies became nonprofits for a reason. So by 2003 there weren’t a lot of loyal Bravo viewers when NBC decided “Queer Eye” fit better there than on their other networks, it was a huge hit, and all that artsy-fartsy stuff quickly went away for good. Good for business, I guess, and certainly a lot more popular than its first incarnation.
A&E
ARTS: April 1981. The Entertainment Channel: June 1982. Merged to become A&E: February 1984. Bravo wasn’t alone, as all three broadcast networks established cultural cable channels in 1981-82. Two vanished quickly: CBS Cable went under after a year, and NBC sold its flailing Entertainment Channel to ABC’s ARTS (technically the Alpha Repertory Television Service), creating A&E. By the ‘90s the arts content had faded and the network was decidedly middlebrow, dominated by its documentary series Biography and lots of reruns of crime dramas, most notably Law & Order. By the 2000s it went lowbrow with even Biography giving way to trashy reality shows. It’s happened a thousand times, we can’t have nice things.
MTV
August 1981. By now there have been jokes about MTV not showing music videos anymore for two or three times longer than MTV actually showed music videos. At the beginning, it was nothing but music videos, and the occasional interstitial from a VJ or some pop culture news from “MTV News.” Slowly music and music-related programming gave way to general youth culture, with highlights including comedy game show Remote Control and lowlights including The Real World, forerunner to the entire reality TV genre that’s since taken over… well, pretty much all TV.
The saying is that music was best when you were a teenager, and the same is obviously true about MTV, which peaked with Total Request Live. This was a music video request show/live interview show/place for teenage fans to scream in Times Square for their favorite boy bands and pop idols. You kinda had to be there. As an angry rocker I was perpetually miffed that NSYNC and Britney always topped the charts and the best I could settle for was Korn in 3rd place, and I didn’t even like Korn that much. (In retrospect, obviously Justin Timberlake had more talent than every nu metal band combined. Just don’t tell my teenage self that.) Oh, the cartoons were also good - Beavis & Butt-Head, Daria, Clone High were all classics, and Liquid Television was delightfully disturbing.
Ultimately YouTube and social media were what killed off TRL as the center of youth culture, and (this is a common theme) MTV became all about trashy reality shows, and increasingly little-watched reality shows at that. They still have their annual Video Music Awards as a relic of their past, who knows how long they’ll keep spending money on that… music has become so fragmented that one television station serving the musical tastes of the whole country seems damn near impossible. But then I’m getting old, I’d barely recognize the music stars of today regardless. Anyway, this is clearly a network whose time has come and gone.
FNN
November 1981. The Financial News Network was the first of many business news channels, and set the pace for them. It was the first channel to adopt a continuous ticker, with white and blue bars at the bottom of the screen scrolling stock prices throughout the trading day - still the trademark look of its successor CNBC, only with more advanced graphics. I’ve worked on several trading floors and you can always expect to see a screen with CNBC on mute in most traders’ lines of sight. People don’t pay as much attention to what the talking heads are saying as to what the numbers say. It’s perfect background noise television, and I expect something like it to stick around.
For most of the ‘80s FNN dominated this space, with the same company running a sports channel called Score on the same feed outside business hours. In 1989 NBC launched a competitor, the Consumer News and Business Channel, repurposing the feed of the widely distributed but little-watched Tempo network (see part 2). Early CNBC had the backing of a major media company but was perpetually behind FNN in the ratings… and then in 1990 an accounting scandal drove FNN into bankruptcy, allowing NBC to buy it on the cheap. In May 1991, CNBC would take over FNN’s feed and replace its own gray ticker with FNN’s white and blue ones, which have been part of its look ever since. (Score, meanwhile, would shut down entirely.) A few years later, Bloomberg Television would debut as a spiritual successor to FNN, hiring much of its former staff. More recently Fox Business has challenged CNBC’s ratings dominance, but on most trading floors I visit CNBC is still the channel of choice. On mute, of course.
CNN Headline News
January 1982. Speaking of background noise channels, the original format for this channel (called CNN2 its first few months) was one of the stronger ones: a 30-minute straight newscast, repeated twice an hour, 24 hours a day. No pundits, no interviews, just headlines. It’s basically taking the all-news radio format that’s been successful for many stations around the country and translating it to television. In fact, Group W, which owned a lot of those radio stations, co-owned a competing news channel with the same format, SNC, in 1982-83; after SNC failed many cable systems replaced it with Headline News.
For 20 years the news wheel chugged quietly along on CNN’s younger sibling, but then the quest for more viewers and more dollars led to its inevitable enshittification. First they introduced prime time talk shows with the execrable Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck; then the news wheel gave way to making a more interactive, internet-driven news channel (which worked no better than when MSNBC tried it earlier). Somewhere around here the channel’s name was officially abbreviated to HLN. Finally, it ended up as the home of sleazy true crime shows like “Forensic Files” and quietly cut all its remaining newscasts. Since the recent merger with Discovery Networks, HLN has been seen as a redundant copy of Investigation Discovery and is likely to get eliminated or retooled soon.
As a side note, CNN also produced straight news feeds intended to be shown as background noise in various settings. The CNN Airport Network was a mainstay in terminals nationwide, its content being a tweaked version of HLN with more weather coverage and larger graphics - as well as cutting out stories about plane crashes. It outlasted the “Headline News” format for quite a while, finally shutting down during the COVID pandemic. Much shorter-lived was CNN Checkout, meant for grocery stores, which everyone just saw as an unwelcome distraction.
Lifetime
Daytime: March 1982. Cable Health Network: June 1982. Merged to become Lifetime: February 1984. “Television for women” was its slogan for a while, and as a man I can’t say too much on this channel ever appealed to me… except when they had game shows, I like game shows. The “Lifetime Original Movie” on the other hand has always been the same paint-by-numbers story about women in danger. Maybe someone can fill me in over whether this channel used to be better, I feel like it’s always been about the same, but then I’m not the target audience.
The Weather Channel
May 1982. This must have been a technological marvel when it debuted - real-time, constantly updating local weather maps generated at each cable company’s head-end, automatically intercut with national forecasts from the channel’s studios. Before we had always-on internet connections, this was the fastest way to get up-to-date weather forecasts. But nowadays there’s an app for that, and the linear channel has become divorced from the forecasting service on Weather.com (owned by IBM for many years, now independent) and it now belongs to comedian turned low-end media mogul Byron Allen.
To be honest, the most memorable things about the Weather Channel have been its absurd efforts to monetize its presence on everyone’s cable box, like showing weather-related movies in prime time, or inventing its own names for winter storms to replicate the phenomenon of hurricane coverage - the National Weather Service has called them out for that last one just adding confusion.
CMT and The Nashville Network
March 1983. I’m lumping these two together because they launched within a week of each other with the same idea - MTV for country music. Indeed Country Music Television abbreviated its name as “CMTV” until MTV lawyered up. They were competitors until 1991 when TNN’s parent company bought CMT, and their formats started drifting apart afterwards - CMT continued airing country music videos and shows about country music, while TNN diversified into more general rural-related TV.
Since 2000, CMT has become a general rural network (although it’s the last of the “legacy” music channels to still show music videos sometimes). TNN meanwhile was refocused as a men’s network, I guess as a counterpart to Lifetime, its name changing first to “The National Network” and then to Spike. I have to say the most interesting thing about Spike was its bitter messaging on social media during its last few weeks on the air, after the announcement it would rebrand yet again to “Paramount Network” and end its original programming.
Again, I’m not from the country, I don’t listen to country, I can’t say much about the country channels.
Disney Channel
April 1983. The original premise of the Disney Channel was to be all-ages family content, closer to the CBN/Family Channel than to Nickelodeon. It wasn’t all cartoons and sassy tween sitcoms like it is now. They had a lot of old Disney movies, especially the weird British live-action ones they made as a tax dodge, and sometimes drama series like the Canadian import “Tales from Avonlea.” The channel was also a commercial-free premium channel until well into the ‘90s, when they decided to go for a more mainstream audience and tweaked themselves into a kids’ channel to go head-to-head with Nick and CN.
Disney has always been quite protective of its brand - you wouldn’t see its movies just anywhere, they would carefully curate airings on broadcast TV and brand them as “The Wonderful World of Disney” or something similar. During the premium channel days, the Disney Channel was the only place you could see the old Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck theatrical shorts, while Looney Tunes had been sold and resold and could be seen on three or four different channels, all free over the air or basic cable. I feel like this difference in exposure is why Bugs and Daffy stayed popular as cartoon characters in their own right, while Mickey and Donald are only really known as theme park mascots. Well, I was one of the relative few whose parents paid for the Disney Channel back in the day, and the Disney shorts were good too! But they’d never let them get as overexposed as their competitors.
Also notable - Disney didn’t produce any made-for-TV cartoons until 1985, and well into the ‘90s their cartoons were made for broadcast TV, either the Saturday morning network blocks or its syndicated “Disney Afternoon” for independent channels. Only after the E/I mandate killed off Saturday morning cartoons would the Disney Channel start showing much in the way of original animation.
ACTS and VISN
ACTS: May 1984. VISN: July 1988. Merged: October 1992. There have been lots of religious channels founded by televangelists, mainly out to line their own pockets and build their empires (no I’m not any kind of cynical atheist, perish the thought). These two channels stand out as having been backed by major religious denominations, and mainly not being in the business of collecting donations.
The Southern Baptists launched their American Christian Television Service in 1984, as a means of distributing video programming to churches. By 1988, it had spun off as its own entity and also included other evangelical Protestant denominations. Meanwhile a consortium of mainline Protestant denominations launched the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network, which would grow to include Catholics, Mormons, and non-Christian religions. The two would merge into VISN/ACTS in 1992. The rationale for such a wide range of religions, many of whom considered each other heretical, on a single network was practicality. Although cable systems had grown to around 70-80 channels by this point, there simply wasn’t enough space for each religious group to get its own channel.
Ultimately none of the religious groups involved would get much out of VISN/ACTS as stakes were sold to secular broadcasters in hopes of attracting a more general audience. The network rebranded to the Faith & Values Channel, then the Odyssey Network, and finally to the Hallmark Channel as the greeting card/romance movie company became the majority owner. The religious content was quietly discontinued some time after.
Maybe a more focused channel for a single religion would’ve done better in the digital cable era - and nowadays just about anyone can post videos to YouTube or TikTok or wherever - but this one seemed doomed by the technological limitations of the time.
AMC
October 1984. Here’s a channel that got outdone at its original concept, and had to improvise something new. For its first decade and a half, American Movie Classics mainly showed old movies, unedited, commercial-free, introduced by on-camera hosts… in other words, exactly the same concept that Turner Classic Movies would launch in 1994. The two networks had different film libraries, but TCM owned its movies outright while AMC had to license them. Without commercials they both had to rely on cable company licensing fees, but Turner (and later Time Warner) had other, ad-supported networks to bundle with TCM while AMC struggled with carriage… so in 2001 AMC started showing ads during movies, as well as more recent movies, and stopped using its full name. The joke was now, it was just Another Movie Channel.
And then AMC started producing high-quality original series and we’ve all kinda forgotten it used to be a rival to TCM. Sometimes these have happy endings.
VH1
January 1985. The other music video channel. Notably this was never a competitor to MTV, but owned by MTV Networks from day one. It targeted a slightly older audience and, at least during the ‘90s, found its niche as a channel with shows about music - Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video were its signature hits. Its network decay began in the mid-2000s with the debut of “I Love the ‘80s” and soon the whole network was people riffing on pop culture… followed by trashy reality shows, because that’s where every network that doesn’t have a concept anymore ends up.
Nostalgia Channel
February 1985. I can remember we got this channel but I don’t have much nostalgia for Nostalgia. The original concept was a competitor to AMC with a much lower budget - the movies were mostly public domain and they had commercials. Since then it’s had more rebrandings and format changes than I’m going to bother explaining, and is currently called “YTA” and shows a weird mishmash of low-budget filler. I guess it gets some points just for lasting so long.
Discovery Channel
June 1985. Edutainment is difficult to get right - too educational and you’re boring, too entertaining and you’re just making shit up. So it is with Discovery, which started out known for nature documentaries and now has fine programming like Naked and Afraid, as well as the gorgeous visuals and questionable scientific accuracy of Shark Week. But at least the channel still has some factual content and isn’t just wall-to-wall reality like much of its cohort.
Probably the most financially successful cable channel, as Discovery Communications would end up growing big enough to acquire Warner Media from AT&T… though with the combined company’s financial problems they may be regretting that merger.
Pay Per View
Viewer’s Choice: November 1985. When PPV platforms first launched, they were scrambled channels that you got pay your cable company to descramble for one movie at a time. Schedules were fixed so you couldn’t decide when to watch, but it was more convenient than going to a video store. Prices were probably competitive, I don’t know, I was a kid and I don’t remember how much things cost.
The dominant PPV channel in the US was initially called Viewer’s Choice, during the ‘90s was just unbranded “Pay Per View” (you’d only have the one your cable company had and it was probably this one), and after the digital transition became known as “In Demand.” It was - technically still is - a joint venture of the major cable companies. At first there was a single linear channel with different movies through the week, and the occasional boxing match or wrestling show (and then MMA when that became a thing). Later they would add additional channels that each showed a single movie on repeat. Finally in the 2000s digital cable boxes were able to stream movies on demand, and the linear channels would fade into disuse. They were shut down in 2016, and now “In Demand” is fully an on-demand service.
In addition to the scrambled PPV channels there would also be an unscrambled “barker channel” that ran a continuous loop of ads for whatever was on PPV that month. In my area and probably a lot of others, it was on channel 3, which was also the channel your VCR took over when you watched a tape on it. So even though we usually rented movies instead of watching PPV, I caught a lot of the barker channel in between tapes and I always knew exactly what was on.
Festival
April 1986. This was, briefly, the third premium channel from HBO/Cinemax. Festival was a more family-friendly offering without the sex or violence of the company’s other channels - more a competitor with Disney than with Showtime/TMC. Its monthly fee was much lower than the other premium channels’, but the market was already saturated. Few cable companies carried it, even fewer customers subscribed to it, and HBO would pull the plug at the end of 1988. A few years later they tried again with a bundled sub-channel, HBO Family, and it lasted a whole lot longer.
There are only so many subscription fees any given person is willing to pay. There might be a lesson here for streaming services.
Travel Channel
February 1987. Self-explanatory, a channel full of travel documentaries (at least until a couple of years ago when it re-themed to being mostly about haunted houses, but didn’t change the name for some reason). The most interesting thing about it is that it was originally owned by Trans World Airlines, who had been producing travel interstitials for little-watched premium channel Home Theater Network and took over the entire 24-hour feed when HTN went under.
Maybe TWA would still be around if they had a cable channel full of haunted houses… or maybe I’ve been writing this post for too long.
E!
July 1987. Ah, finally a network that didn’t degrade into complete trash, because it always was complete trash. Called “Movietime” for its first few years, this was a channel full of red-carpet interviews and similar piffle until the Kardashians arrived and pioneered the age of celebreality, crowding most of the previous content out. And nothing of value was lost. (Okay, almost nothing, “Talk Soup” was kinda funny.)
Prevue Channel
April 1988. Like the Weather Channel, this was a technological innovation that soon became obsolete. It began in 1981 as EPG, a software suite for cable companies to produce their own scrolling electronic program guides, hence the name. This was quite handy at a time when TV Guide magazine and newspaper TV listings didn’t include many cable channels, plus it told you what channel number each network was. It was just scrolling text with no soundtrack, many cable companies played music but on mine we had a staticky voice droning unintelligibly. I’m now pretty sure that was NOAA Weather Radio.
Beginning in 1988, the software company provided an upgrade to “Prevue Channel” with the scrolling listings on the bottom half of the screen and a national video feed of promos and ads on the top half. One by one, cable companies upgraded over the following years. Strictly speaking this made the service worse, since it took longer for the channel list to scroll around (especially as more cable companies expanded their lineups) but it was also more profitable. Somewhere along the line Prevue merged with TV Guide magazine, becoming the TV Guide Network.
Then obsolescence came, in the form of improved cable boxes with interactive program guides. TVGN responded to this by starting to show full-length TV shows, expanding to the entire frame, and leaving just one line of scrolling listings for the few stragglers still using analog cable. Once everything went digital, TVGN (by now no longer connected to the print magazine - is it even around anymore?) changed its name to Pop. It’s best known as the first American channel to show the hit CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek… and by “best known” I mean I couldn’t tell you what American channel showed it either.
TNT
October 1988. In 1986, Ted Turner had bought the renowned movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Lacking either the money or the interest to produce new movies, he would sell it a few months later but hold onto the copyrights to all every MGM movie made up to that point. His next cable channel, Turner Network Television, started out as a showcase for all those movies he now owned.
But this was no Turner Classic Movies - TNT edited the movies for broadcast, had commercial interruptions, and became infamous for showing colorized versions of black-and-white classics. Until TCM would improve Ted’s reputation as a film preservationist, it was a running joke to associate Turner with colorization.
Anyway - TNT also showed basketball, pro wrestling, some cartoons from the Hanna-Barbera library (which Turner bought in 1991 and then similarly launched the Cartoon Network to showcase in 1992) and the usual mix of reruns. It was basically a less quirky clone of TBS until the 2000s when TBS became the comedy station and TNT became the drama one.
Currently it looks like WBD is positioning TNT as mainly a sports channel, using it as an overall brand for sports coverage on their other channels - and rebranding some of their foreign sports channels as “TNT”. Movies will probably stick around as filler. But they’ve learned their lesson: the black-and-white movies will not be colorized.
Comedy Central
December 1989. Just squeezing in before my arbitrary cut-off at the end of the 1980s is the Comedy Channel, renamed Comedy Central after a merger with rival Ha! in 1991 (and a two-month stint as “CTV” - no, not the Canadian one). While Ha! was mostly sitcom reruns, the Comedy Channel was much closer to the eventual Comedy Central format, focusing mainly on stand-up and sketch comedy, so I’ve decided that Comedy Central began in 1989.
This was the home of most of the original run of MST3K, one of the first grown-up shows I liked as a kid. The other early hit was Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Both would end up on other channels and replaced by South Park and The Daily Show as CC’s signature shows - which they still are. Maybe they still will be when the rest of the network goes away.
One thing I miss from Comedy Central’s glory days is the stand-up specials. Up-and-coming comedians could do short sets on “Premium Blend” and more established comics would get half-hour “Comedy Central Presents” specials, which allowed far more comedians to reach a national audience than could get a coveted guest spot on Carson or Letterman or Leno. Nowadays it seems like Netflix has cornered the market on stand-up and they focus a lot more on bigger names… but every big name was small once. It’s a much steeper climb to go viral on social media than to have your best material repeated on a cable network a couple times a month.
Odds and ends
1990 saw the launch of PrimeStar, making digital satellite TV with dozens of channels available nationwide; it would be followed by DirecTV in 1994 and Dish Network in 1996. Meanwhile cable companies were expanding to 70-80 analog channels in the early ‘90s, and by 2000 some were offering hundreds of digital channels. So by this point there were too many channels starting and shutting down and merging to keep track of. I’ll just note the most significant debuts after 1990: TruTV (1991 as Court TV), Cartoon Network (1992), TCM (1994), IFC (1994), FX (1994), HGTV (1994), History (1995), MSNBC (1996), Fox News (1996).
Looking back at the cable era… it was a lot of garbage and a few gems, much like broadcast TV. And, frankly, every other medium, just ask Ted Sturgeon. But it’s what I grew up watching and I’ll always cherish some of those memories… eh, this is a weak ending but you probably stopped reading a while ago.
