Remember something like this?

[retroguy]

As a child I admit to being one who needed to be watched. I played with everything I could get my hands on. Appliances, televisions, radios, cars, you name it. My favorite time to do this, was of course, at night. I'd sneak downstairs after everyone else was asleep and start having my fun. We didn't have cable right away, as my mother didn't like the idea of holes in her walls, but we had something similar. Super TV was a paid service like cable that operated over the air. It too got better at night. I'd sneak down to watch the programs I'd never be able to watch supervised. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Today I remember it fondly. Anyone else have something like this way back?

Super TV (American TV channel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[whirlcool]

There were various enterprises around the country in the late 70's/early 80's that had this service. In Houston, they had something called "On TV". Cable TV first came to Houston in the very early 80's and relatively slow to spread. OnTv was a service that didn't require a cable, just a small UHF antenna and a decoder box. After the cable reached about 50% of the Houston market, OnTV disappeared. At night, they played naughty movies.

 

[neptuneguy27]

OMG!

I had almost forgotten about SuperTV. My parent's had that installed in the early 80's in our house. I remember that you had to switch from regular TV to "SuperTV" in order to access it. Wow that was such a long time ago. As I recall it didn't last too long in our house as my mom and dad we getting ticked off at my older brother watching some things that were a bit unsavory. It wasn't so much that he was watching it after everyone went to bed at night, but he'd fall asleep and forget to turn the set off. So they had it pulled out. Talk about about a blast from the past.

Christopher

 

[petek]

It sounds familiar. I think there was something similar here but it never took off and was more aimed at rural folks. Actually now I think about it it wasn't UHF based but microwaves. Cable tv was pretty much standard fare in Canada by the mid 60's long before it caught on in the US.

 

[nurdlinger]

American Super Channel

That's what it was called in Tucson, and they distributed HBO in the pre-cable days. It was a microwave multipoint distribution system, not scrambled. They relied on the unavailabity of receiver equipment. A really-credible urban legend is that the radio geniuses who worked at the Hughes Aircraft plant here designed an appropriate receiver and antenna, and produced them on Hughes' equipment to be black-marketed around the community.