TGC

Title: YDKF Episode 153: MTV
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 10:00:05 +0000
Link: http://podcast.robohara.com/?p=472

Description: If you remember hearing (or saying) “I want my MTV,” then this episode is for you! In episode 153 of You Don’t Know Flack I talk about the classic era of MTV, from August 1st, 1981 when the channel began until the Real World, Road Rules, and all those other reality shows ruined everything. I […]

I was lucky enough to be in the test market for MTV when it went live August 1st; my father let me stay up past Midnight to watch it happen. The test market was northern New Jersey; only about 4000 households got MTV when it launched. It took about two weeks for access to spread to all of New Jersey and New York, and then nationwide shortly after that.

Because stereo TV didn't exist yet, you got stereo MTV by tuning your FM radio to a frequency that would rebroadcast the audio signal in stereo. MTV interstitials promised free "FM dial stickers" you could send away for to put on your FM receiver to remind you of the proper position on the dial.

I remastered the first four hours of that inaugural broadcast both in honor of MTV's 30th anniversary, and also in disgust of how they were running highly edited "original" footage of the event on VH1. If you know where to look, you can find the full DVD-9 of my remaster floating out there somewhere...

Oh wow, that's cool! Knowing you attention to detail when it comes to remastering stuff I'll bet that's awesome to both see and hear.

I remember a lot of the MTV ads mentioned that their broadcast was in stereo. I don't know if our cable was in stereo or not but our television assuredly was not. We had a big console television in our living room until 1985 I think, when we replaced it with a rear projection big screen television from Mitsubishi.

The remaster cleans up the video, preserves the full 30i signal (real video is fluid, boys and girls), and I also painstakingly added stereo tracks to 95% of the disc (which required editing the studio tracks because the videos themselves were edited down).

If you have trouble finding it, LMK.

Cool episode! A couple of related stories came to mind when I listened. The Thriller video made me late for school. I would walk to my friends house in the morning and watch TV until it was time to leave for school. We missed the premier showing of Thriller, but it was replayed quite a bit for the month after it hit, The morning VJ announced it was 'coming up' so we waited around to see it. We didn't know that 'Coming up' meant 45 minutes later. We saw it and then had to run all the way to school to make it to second period.

Free HBO. When cable first made it to our neighborhood the cable company had these HBO and CineMax line filters up on the utility poles. If you paid for HBO and 'da Max Larry the cable guy would come out and unscrew them from your service drop and viola, premium content. My brother managed to get some of these filters and make dummy cutouts by removing the guts. We climbed up the pole one dark night and replaced the real ones with the fakes. Viola! Free content. lasted about a year until they came out with the set top boxes.

This was a popular video that got a lot of feedback. I should podcast about MTV every week!