Prevue Guide Forums

Well, I had a cable company in Canada called Sunlight Cable. In Dec. 1988, EPG Sr. launched on my system and it had worked well. My cable system upgraded to Prevue Guide in Feb. 1991 and it was a bit different from how Prevue Guide in the US worked. There was no segments, but showed the Prevue Guide promos and idents. Other than that, it showed local advertisements and information about Sunlight Cable. Some would show info about ordering pay-per-view. I remember that one of the ads said "THIS MESSAGE CAN BE SEEN IN 60.000 HOMES. TO ADVERTISE, CALL 232-2253." It would crash like 5 times a year. I had a tape from July 1991 that (the last time I watched it) it showed the guide showing only 2 channels and then rebooted. The tape is broken however. It then shows the C-Band listings before going back to normal. It was mainly the same when the blue grid appeared. It showed "Prevue Guide" until early Jan. 1994. In 1998, some changes were done. Some segments were shown. I remember Prevue News and Weather and Prevue Revue. When it changed to TV Guide Channel, Sunlight Cable only carried it for a week. Since many people upgraded to boxes with IPGs (like me), Sunlight Cable took off TV Guide Channel.

Quite interesting on that Canadian Cable Companies also had Prevue Guide. So, you experienced the same problems as people here in the US did about the crashing issue. Did you have Prevue Guide's sister channel Sneak Prevue? I came to Prevue Guide and Sneak Prevue in the late 90s (May 1998 to be exact).

JFR_SneakPrevue98 wrote:Quite interesting on that Canadian Cable Companies also had Prevue Guide. So, you experienced the same problems as people here in the US did about the crashing issue. Did you have Prevue Guide's sister channel Sneak Prevue? I came to Prevue Guide and Sneak Prevue in the late 90s (May 1998 to be exact).

We never had Sneak Prevue since our pay-per-view service (Viewer's Choice) had it's own channel for info like that. Sunlight Cable in early 1998 thought about switching to it's own pay-per-view service and Sneak Prevue, but they decided to keep the one that they had.

Ok, I was just wondering. Only if your tape didn't break then you could have posted the video on YouTube and put the link here. You would have really liked watching Sneak Prevue. On my cable channel lineup we still have TV Guide Channel (now TV Guide Network), which isn't the same as it used to be. It now has become a Nick-at-Nite/TV Land wannabe. Not sure if you have the TV Guide iGuide as your main IPG/EPG but if you go to the main menu and select "Listings By Time" and it kind of looks like what the Prevue Guide/TV Guide Channel looked like.

On another note I'm thinking about getting a Sneak Prevue shirt made.

JFR_SneakPrevue98 wrote:Ok, I was just wondering. Only if your tape didn't break then you could have posted the video on YouTube and put the link here. You would have really liked watching Sneak Prevue. On my cable channel lineup we still have TV Guide Channel (now TV Guide Network), which isn't the same as it used to be. It now has become a Nick-at-Nite/TV Land wannabe. Not sure if you have the TV Guide iGuide as your main IPG/EPG but if you go to the main menu and select "Listings By Time" and it kind of looks like what the Prevue Guide/TV Guide Channel looked like.

I don't have the iGuide but, I have the IPG that comes with many Scientific Atlanta boxes. I think the name of it might have been SARA.

Win95Setup wrote:Well, I had a cable company in Canada called Sunlight Cable. In Dec. 1988, EPG Sr. launched on my system and it had worked well. My cable system upgraded to Prevue Guide in Feb. 1991 and it was a bit different from how Prevue Guide in the US worked. There was no segments, but showed the Prevue Guide promos and idents. Other than that, it showed local advertisements and information about Sunlight Cable. Some would show info about ordering pay-per-view. I remember that one of the ads said "THIS MESSAGE CAN BE SEEN IN 60.000 HOMES. TO ADVERTISE, CALL 232-2253." It would crash like 5 times a year. I had a tape from July 1991 that (the last time I watched it) it showed the guide showing only 2 channels and then rebooted. The tape is broken however. It then shows the C-Band listings before going back to normal. It was mainly the same when the blue grid appeared. It showed "Prevue Guide" until early Jan. 1994. In 1998, some changes were done. Some segments were shown. I remember Prevue News and Weather and Prevue Revue. When it changed to TV Guide Channel, Sunlight Cable only carried it for a week. Since many people upgraded to boxes with IPGs (like me), Sunlight Cable took off TV Guide Channel.

some systems still seem to have some kind of TV Guide Channel with local ad's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRCd1WZOfaY

JoeTheDragon wrote:some systems still seem to have some kind of TV Guide Channel with local ad's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRCd1WZOfaY

That is a Rogers guide, and it doesn't really have any connection to the TV Guide/Prevue stuff we're discussing here. It does have a TV Guide logo on it, but probably only because they get their listings through Rovi, who licenses out that brand.

I remember when Prevue Guide crashed sometime in January 1993. The listings disappeared and about a few minutes later, the C-Band listings appeared. At the end, no Prevue Guide logo appeared on the top half of the screen. It returned after it rebooted. After about an hour, the listings appeared.

When I had cable back in 1993, I started tuning in to the Prevue Channel and while I was watching, they were typing an ad for the cable company, "Sammons Communications Inc." on how to ordered "Pay-Per-View Movies and Events on Channel 15 and 99" and it was done live before they reboot the system again to run normally. It was similar to YouTube user, nobie13's clip.

Back when I had cable, the Prevue Channel used to be one of my "go to" channels along with The Weather Channel. I remembered one day back in 1993 (shortly after when the blue grid made its deibut), while I was watching, the local channel listings disappeared mysteriously as it appeared on our cable signal and after when it disappeared, some strange computer-like window with the national Prevue C-band satellite listings was being displayed and with two running video clips with the Opening Act theme music playing at the same time. I rarely saw any maintence-releated stuff going on from what I remembered on our Prevue system. From what I remembered since I was little back then, it kind of freaked me out for some reason. Anyways, that was the only time I ever saw it happen on our system. I wish I had footage since I didn't know how to program a VCR back then.