The Cablelink days...

Max_Damage

The TCC thread got me thinking, for those who lived in the Dublin area and had Cablelink, remember having the basic package, but you could still pick-up Sky Sports and Sky Movies, but they were scrambled (still had sound though). I remember sitting 'watching' a fuzzy mess of some films listening to the sound only!

I remember too the odd time they'd open up Sky Movies for one night to the basic package customers.

bonerm

I remember that alright but I certainly never sat there listening to the scramble.

rubadub

My father had sports but not movies. If there was any sort of hiccup they used to give you movies free for a week or so as way of an apology. Then we copped on all we had to do was claim it went off and we would get free movies.

Then I got really smart and figured out they had to send out a update code to turn movies off again, and if your box was not plugged in at this point it would not get the signal so you had the movies!

bonerm

How did you know when the signal was gonna be?

rubadub

bonerm wrote: »

How did you know when the signal was gonna be?

As the OP said they sometimes gave it free as a sort of sampler, for a night or 2, so you knew the signal was coming at some stage over the next few days so just disconnect the decoder box for a few days and watched normal TV.

Same when you complained, you got a free day or 2.

Sids Not

Hmmm.....we used to dream of having Cablelink.......:o

icdg

Max_Damage wrote: »

The TCC thread got me thinking, for those who lived in the Dublin area and had Cablelink, remember having the basic package, but you could still pick-up Sky Sports and Sky Movies, but they were scrambled (still had sound though). I remember sitting 'watching' a fuzzy mess of some films listening to the sound only!

I remember too the odd time they'd open up Sky Movies for one night to the basic package customers.

Sky Movies freeview weekends were rather common in the early 1990s. They'd unscramble to all customers from 6pm-12 midnight Saturday and Sunday (at the time, Sky ran a strategy of starting all movies on both Sky Movies and The Movie Channel on the hour every two hours, so you've get the 6pm, 8pm, and 10pm movies). Sky Movies was BSkyB's first premium service and was the first premium service to be seriously marketed by Cablelink.

Sky Sports was late to Cablelink and IIRC only arrived after they won the rights to the Premier League - it was certainly not there in its FTA days. What is less remembered these days is that as part of the 1994 negotiations to restore BSkyB's basic tier channels to Cablelink (which had been gone since 1992), at one stage Sky Sports 2 was on offer to Cablelink as a basic tier channel. At the time Sky Sports 2 only broadcast at weekends and had no live sports of major consequence. Cablelink decided to carry Eurosport instead.

icdg

I was a bit of a strange child, Cablelink interested me immensely so expect this to be a post of random waffle! In 1995 I remembered getting up around 5am to see what each channel was showing; I was more interested in what went on inside a television or what was on between the programmes. Most of these memories would be from 1994/95.

It was through the Million Dollar Preview Weekend that I first saw Wayne's World. That would have been 1994 or so. They were fairly common back then and I also remember several occasions where the Cryptovision encryption failed and the affected channel went in the clear for an hour or two.

I also remember the more obscure channels, such as the mosaic channel which showed what was on each channel at the time. I think it had 12 screens on it and used Classic FM as the background audio. For a while it also cycled to a mosaic of the premium channels. Whenever Sky Sports 2 was off air (which was very common in those days as it was late Friday and weekends only) it often had a "CHECK SMART CARD" error bouncing across its screen on the mosaic. Sadly I never had a TV that could go higher than 310 MHz at the time so I didn't know if anything else was there above that, Sky Sports 2 was on 304 MHz and I know Sky Sports 3 and The Disney Channel did launch on higher frequencies than that in 1996; though I was gone from Dublin by then and was "treated" to Irish Multichannel MMDS for a year.

Sky Sports 2 and Sky Movies Gold used to show a static ident card when off air but sometimes used a colour bar test card. Before the SS2 launch the 304 MHz channel showed a colour bar test card with a large black stripe covering about half the screen and used BBC Radio 5 Live audio. Speaking of R5 Live, Cablelink must have been one of the only systems to carry it on FM, they used the Astra satellite feed so it obviously had a much better sound quality than 693/909 MW.

Sky News and TCC were on frequencies which were very near those in use by RTÉ 1 and Network 2 from Kippure - I think TV3 and TG4 use these frequencies now on the UPC system. I lived in Ballyfermot which at the time still had the original cable system installed in the 1970s and there was major leakage - so much so that you regularly got herringbone interference all over Sky News and TCC. You could actually see what was on the RTÉ 1/2 channel, ghosted over the Sky News/TCC picture. It used to be fine in the morning before the Kippure TX was switched on but as soon as it was, you could see a ghost outline of the PM5544 test card scrolling across. The cabling was updated in 1994/95 and this corrected the leakage problem - the cables were again replaced by UPC just a couple of months ago so they lasted 15 years - by this stage the new DAB muxes were interfering with BBC 2 analogue so leakage was once again a problem.

Sky Movies Gold changed frequency on satellite (from 11597 V to 10877 V) in September 1995 to accommodate The Disney Channel but Cablelink didn't update their system in time for the change, viewers were treated to a Disney Channel preview loop instead of the regular Sky Movies Gold programming for at least a day but I think it might have been more than that.

The Link channel was also one I mentioned in the TCC post, it came on at 5pm after TCC ended. I mostly remember it using 2FM background audio and showing text based services. It also showed foreign news from 3sat/ZDF, RAI and TVÉ around 9pm or so. I once tried to open teletext during the German news and it was badly corrupted as if it were being played back from a VHS tape (though I think someone corrected me on that a while back, saying it wasn't VHS).

icdg wrote: »

Sky Sports was late to Cablelink and IIRC only arrived after they won the rights to the Premier League - it was certainly not there in its FTA days. What is less remembered these days is that as part of the 1994 negotiations to restore BSkyB's basic tier channels to Cablelink (which had been gone since 1992), at one stage Sky Sports 2 was on offer to Cablelink as a basic tier channel. At the time Sky Sports 2 only broadcast at weekends and had no live sports of major consequence. Cablelink decided to carry Eurosport instead.

I knew I read this somewhere! Ended up watching the Sky Sports 2 launch (scrambled) expecting it to clear up, though I suppose I was only 9 at the time. Felt like a muppet though! I seem to remember Soccer AM being briefly in the clear the next morning (Saturday, 20/08/1994) but it didn't last long.

syngindub

remember the channel that used to show all channells in little boxes. i used to spend many an hour watching the wrestling staring a picture no more than 80 * 80 px

starviewadams

Haha so did I,my dad used to always warn me that it would ruin my eyes!

dlofnep

I had cabelink here in Waterford. I remember Sky Movies & Sky Sports were free at first.

Mike 1972

Karsini wrote: »

Sadly I never had a TV that could go higher than 310 MHz at the time so I didn't know if anything else was there above that,.

Not much above that (in 1994 anyway) IIRC went up to 320 MHz (static promo for the FM radio service)

Remember the "link" channel. Pretty pointless (text pages repeated on a 15-20 minute loop) some of the pages were informative but one had to sit through lots of uninteresting/seen already stuff before they came around and sometimes they didnt stay up long enough to read fully.

Why on earth didnt they just put teletext on the mosaic channel. Would have been far more useful.

mikedublin

Do any of you remember Lifestyle and Screensport ? From back in 1989 and 1990 ? Lifestyle was all old american gameshows, soaps like Search For Tomorrow, and chat shows like Sally Jesse Raphael. The station logo was a animated butterfly going on and off the screen, and the links between the programms were hosted by David Hamilton. At the weekends there were some really obscure sci fi films like Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Jason Of Star Command.
Screensport was some good sports in about 12 different languages including motor racing and wrestling, but with some pretty odd sports thrown in.

(I used to work for Lifestyle and Screensport at the transmission centre in London, and we were supposed to go out on Cablelink but I was never sure if anyone over in Ireland ever actually watched it LOL).

mikedublin

mikedublin wrote: »

Do any of you remember Lifestyle and Screensport ? From back in 1989 and 1990 ? Lifestyle was all old american gameshows, soaps like Search For Tomorrow, and chat shows like Sally Jesse Raphael. The station logo was a animated butterfly going on and off the screen, and the links between the programms were hosted by David Hamilton. At the weekends there were some really obscure sci fi films like Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Jason Of Star Command.
Screensport was some good sports in about 12 different languages including motor racing and wrestling, but with some pretty odd sports thrown in.

(I used to work for Lifestyle and Screensport at the transmission centre in London, and we were supposed to go out on Cablelink but I was never sure if anyone over in Ireland ever actually watched it LOL).

I can remember Lifestyle and Screensport on Cablelink (just barely), actually remember the idents more than the programmes. Classic Concentration with Alex Trebek was one show I always associate with Lifestyle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5mH8HT6xE