UHF Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Slippery Network Affiliation is essentially a repost from twenty years ago. I wrote about Gilmore Girls, then a favorite show of my wife and myself. The television coverage is no longer the same in northern New York. I’m fascinated that this was the first long post on this blog.

I had set the VCR to tape at home. But I neglected to tell my wife that she needed to put in a FRESH (just like the WB!) tape, and the incumbent tape ran out of space about 20 minutes into the show! (I would have changed it, except I was out of town.)

Since I was still in Lake Placid on Tuesday, I went to my room after the SBDC awards banquet at about 10 p.m., turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, and came across a Gilmore Girls episode. Initially, I assumed it was a rerun broadcast on ABC Family cable, but it soon became evident that it was THAT NIGHT’S episode, which I watched.

But why was it on at 10 p.m.? Was there some (amazingly rare) Presidential news conference or major catastrophe that backed up the programming?

Nah.

There is no WB affiliate in the Plattsburgh, NY/Burlington, VT television market, so WFFF in Burlington (actually Colchester), FOX 44, broadcasts the 8-10 pm WB shows from 10 pm to midnight!

Big city TV

Those of you in large markets may not appreciate this fully. When I was a kid, there were seven stations in New York City: 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 7 (ABC), 13 (PBS), and 5, 9, and 11 (all independents). Eventually, 5 became a Fox affiliate, 11 became the WB’s outlet, and 9 went with UPN (and moved to New Jersey).

(Incidentally, this numbering is why most fictional TV stations in those days were 3, 6, 8, or 12, the remaining numbers on the VHF dial, or some upper number on the UHF dial, Channels 14-83. WJM, Channel 12, Minneapolis, is most notable on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And if you don’t know what the heck I mean by VHF and UHF, look here.)

Small town TV

But in a smaller market, such as Binghamton, NY, where I grew up (and at a time when there were only the three “major” networks), there were only two stations, WNBF, Channel 12 (CBS), and WINR, Channel 40 (NBC).

Then, one Saturday morning in the fall of 1962, I turned on the TV just before 7 a.m. to Channel 34. Where there was nothing, suddenly we had a third station! It was WBJA, an ABC affiliate. My TV viewing choices had just increased by 50%!

I didn’t realize until later that Channel 12 (and perhaps Channel 40) was broadcasting some ABC programming before Channel 34 came on the scene. Lawrence Welk, an ABC program, was showing on Channel 12 on Saturday nights at 6 or 6:30 pm. I recall that other ABC shows such as Bachelor Father, The Flintstones, Hawaiian Eye, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie & Harriet, The Real McCoys, and Top Cat would show up on the schedule, often on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, outside of prime time (which was usually 7:30-11 pm in those days.) I remember these shows quite clearly; most were off the schedule by the fall of 1962. I must have seen them SOMEWHERE. Cable didn’t exist, and I didn’t go to New York City that often.

Subsequently, I learned that some stations would swap in a popular show on their secondary affiliation, dump the primary affiliate’s show, or relegate it to an off-peak time slot.

Shows broadcast by one network appearing on the affiliate of another network were common in most small markets from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, when there was a fourth network, Dumont.

You big-market folks don’t understand the confusion!¦

While researching a book about local television that I will almost certainly never write, I discovered that, after World War II, there was a great demand for having local television stations in the United States. TV in those days was limited to what was called VHF (very high frequency) of channels 1 to 13; eventually, channel 1 was reassigned. But with only 12 individual choices of TV stations, there were, inevitably, issues of station signals interfering with other broadcasts.

By 1949, there were just over 100 local stations in the country. While some large cities, such as New York and Los Angeles had four or more stations, other places had only one or two, and some places such as Denver, CO and Austin, TX had none.

So the Federal Communications Commission, the government body in charge of these things, instituted was called the Freeze of 1948, with over 700 applications waiting to be addressed, and only some already in the pipeline getting approved. The freeze was only supposed to have lasted a few months; it ended up taking four years.

By this time, the FCC had offered the stations the opportunity to broadcast on a different set of frequencies known as UHF, ultra high frequency, initially channels 14 through 83. There was only one little problem; most sets were not designed to access the UHF signal! As in any hardware/software balance issues of today, TV manufacturers didn’t want to make sets with UHF capacity unless there were enough stations broadcasting in UHF. And broadcasters didn’t want to invest in a UHF station unless there were enough sets that could air their signal.

There was one workaround: buying a converter. But would people pay for a device to get greater television access when they had been getting it for free? Eventually, UHF managed to stick, in no small part because of the All-Channel Receiver Act (ACRA) in the early 1960s, requiring UHF capacity on TVs. Unfortunately, before that happened, a wager by the Dumont network on the UHF technology eventually led to the network’s demise.

UHF was also clunky, even after the passage of the ACRA. While the set would click to each station between 2 and 13, the UHF dial was like a radio dial of that era, and tuning it to a given setting was a sometimes thing. This meant that getting an outside antenna was pretty much imperative.

Since UHF was less than prime viewing, stations on that end of the dial often broadcast old movies or other inexpensive productions. That was, more or less, the premise of the 1989 movie UHF, starring ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. You can read the reviews and see the trailer and, at least for the time being, watch the whole movie.

One of the great successes of a UHF station was when entrepreneur Ted Turner bought the struggling television station in Atlanta on Channel 17 and eventually turned it into cable network TBS.

Of course, nowadays, people often DO pay for TV via cable, a dish, or other technologies. TV stations are broadcast digitally, so a given station can have 2 or more different signals. The technology is SO much sophisticated now.