HBO/Premium channels

[Link]

When did HBO and Cinemax launch? Was it back in the 80s? It seems like when we first got cable I remember HBO and another station called Spotlight or something like that. Did it change to become Cinemax?

[Richard King]

HBO started sometime in the early '80's. They were the first movie service delivered by satellite and originally were distributed unscrambled to the cable head ends. This created a problem for them when home owners started installing their own dishes and received the programming without paying for it. This also created a problem when some unscrupulous cable companies received it for free and sold it to their customers. Eventually (about 1985) they scrambled, not so much to stomp out the home user (although this was an added "advantage"), but the cable companies that were stealing their signals. I don't remember Spotlight, but there were a bunch of other HBO wannabes at the time that faded into history.

[DJ Rob]

It started in the early '70's. November 1972 to be exact...
http://www.kevinforsyth.net/delta/satcom.htm

[DJ Rob]

Oh and I found this PDF that goes over the history of HBO. It is really interesting...makes me feel old that remember a bunch of it...
http://www.ncta.com/guidebook_pdfs/HomeBoxOffice.pdf

[dishrich]

It seems like when we first got cable I remember HBO and another station called Spotlight or something like that. Did it change to become Cinemax?

You have a good memory; there WAS a premium channel called Spotlight that didn't stay around too long. You must have been on a cable system owned by Times Mirror (later called Dimension Cable) as I was. TM started Spotlight & replaced other premium channels on their systems with this channel. Since they owned the channel, it made them more money than paying a 3rd party provider like HBO or Showtime. In our case, since our system ONLY had 1 premium channel, we lost HBO to this channel.

It TOTALLY SUCKED!!! While it did have some current movies like HBO & Showtime, a lot of them was older films that were not the most popular. They did try some non-movie shows, but they didn't compare to the stuff HBO had. There was such a big outcry in my area, (& so many people that disco'd) TM ended up putting HBO back on the system, but had to start using converter boxes to do this. (back then, our system ONLY had 12 channels & Spotlight was trapped on ch. 5) TM never did get as many HBO subs signed up as they orginally had, because people back then didn't want to hassle with the box.

Eventually TM gave up on the experiment & replaced it with Showtime a couple years later.

[pez2002]

when did the movie chananel debut ?