Prevue Guide Forums

Sorry to bump, but here's another recent video of the renegade TV Guide Channel from Spectrum in Tampa, FL. Again, instead of simulcasting the actual Pop feed, Spectrum in Tampa Bay simulcasts the local Bay News 9 feed. Recently, Bay News 9 renamed itself now as "Spectrum Bay News 9".

Courtesy of Weatherman99:
https://youtu.be/4SqolFYwJEg

No need to apologise for bumping this topic, all sightings of this are interesting!

Here's another TV Guide Network-styled guide, this image being from Western Iowa Telecom.

Image courtesy of my friend GDZippN.

I'll be uploading a video of the scroll later tonight if I remember (if not, then soon).

Here's another interesting clip, re: Pop listings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUXXN6BIbto

AriX wrote: ↑Mon Nov 19, 2018 5:27 pm Here's another interesting clip, re: Pop listings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUXXN6BIbto

The one thing that I even noticed on the video screen is that the top part is all shrunken down to a really tiny size with the audio feed replaced with Christmas music (Music Choice audio feed perhaps?). I wonder if the video feed was even the actual Pop feed, but shrunken down?

That... is weird!

Here's another full-screen Pop guide example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quN376aEI5Y&t=3s

A wacky thought experiment:

It strikes me just how similar the Pop/TV Guide Network grid's functionality is to the Amiga one, down to the channel names (apparently) being limited to 6 characters. And very similar formats being used to describe movies, like:
"Movie title" (rating symbol) (year of release) Comma-separated, list, of actors. One-sentence description. (running time)

It makes me seriously wonder - is it at all possible that the modern guide uses a similar data format to the classic guides?

I'm sure it took them some time to replace the Amiga-based machines with Windows NT-based ones, and we have docs indicating that EPG Jr. was run until at least 2005. That would suggest that both systems were running in parallel for several years. So perhaps they have some common ancestry?

For the record, the Satcom C4 satellite, which traditionally carried the 2400 baud Prevue/EPG data feed, was retired in 2007. The Pop channel is on the Galaxy 15 satellite. One must wonder if any data is available there? Is it possible that guide data is still distributed over satellite, or does it come over the Internet now? It would seem there is capacity on the transponder: https://www.lyngsat.com/Galaxy-15.html

I reckon it's very likely the format is the same or extremely similar. But the other questions...... I dunno....

likely the data format needed to be keep the same or at the state the NT based hardware sourced the data from the analog c band feed.

Look at how long the old Weather Star lasted and how long the weather channel had an Videocipher ii feed.