[sammy-bos]

Does anyone have the channel lineup(s) from circa 1994?

 

[KyL416]

Here's the earliest DirecTV lineup available on the Wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970605045257/http://www.directv.com/programming/listing.html

 

[coconut13]

Does anyone have the channel lineup(s) from circa 1994?

I'm a charter subscriber of D* ( Sept. 10th, 1994 in my area) and have all the literature from those days. Satellite Direct magazine, bills, and promotional literature from USSB and D* from those years.

 

[sammy-bos]

I'm a charter subscriber of D* ( Sept. 10th, 1994 in my area) and have all the literature from those days. Satellite Direct magazine, bills, and promotional literature from USSB and D* from those years.

That's really neat, I really like old technological things I wish I could see

 

[mkdtv21]

I'm a charter subscriber of D* ( Sept. 10th, 1994 in my area) and have all the literature from those days. Satellite Direct magazine, bills, and promotional literature from USSB and D* from those years.

Would it be possible if you could scan some of them and upload the images to this site?

 

[coconut13]

View attachment dtv8.pdf View attachment dtv6.pdf View attachment dtv7.pdf View attachment dtv3.pdf View attachment dtv4.pdf View attachment dtv5.pdf View attachment coop.pdf View attachment directv.pdf View attachment dtv1.pdf View attachment dtv2.pdf

Would it be possible if you could scan some of them and upload the images to this site?

Here are 10 scans of some literature from 1994. Not to experienced scanning and uploading. Just trying this and see what it looks like. Let me know if your looking for anything specific.

 

[mkdtv21]

Thank you very much, that's a big help. I'm shocked at how expensive The Disney Channel was even back in 94 and just for one channel.

 

[KyL416]

Back in 1994 Disney Channel was still a premium channel and priced similarly to HBO and Showtime. To this day it's one of the more expensive channels because, even though its migrated to basic cable, it's still not ad supported.

As for $9.99 for one channel, it was 1994, the standard was about $9.99 for each premium even if the multiplex channels weren't offered. If you were lucky you had a cable provider who gave you HBO2, but most providers only offered Disney Channel, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel as their premiums. If you were lucky and had a cable provider who upgraded their system early, you also got Encore, Flix, Starz and in some cases MoviePLEX, which at the time was a time delayed showcase of a different Encore multiplex channel each day.

Disney Channel West was eventually added, there were initially plans to create a "Disney Channel 2" multiplex channel, but those were scrapped when Disney decided to compete with Nickelodeon and migrate to basic cable. Instead they launched the ad supported Toon Disney (now Disney XD)

If anyone's interested about the fate of some of those channels in the listing:
All News Channel - ceased
America's Talking - ceased operations and became MSNBC
Cinemax 2 - Now MoreMAX
CNN International - Eventually started to time share with CNNfn, when CNNfn folded many providers including DirecTV dropped the channel
CourTV - Now TruTV
HBO 3 - Now HBO Signature
MuchMusic USA - Now Fuse
Newsworld International - Now Al Jazeera America
Prime Network Sports - Now FSN
The Family Channel - Now ABC Family
TNN - Now Spike
TRIO - Dropped by DirecTV and eventually ceased operations, NBCU used its transponder slot to launch Sleuth (Now Cloo)

 

[JoeTheDragon]

Back in 1994 Disney Channel was still a premium channel and priced similarly to HBO and Showtime. To this day it's one of the more expensive channels because, even though its migrated to basic cable, it's still not ad supported.

As for $9.99 for one channel, it was 1994, the standard was about $9.99 for each premium even if the multiplex channels weren't offered. If you were lucky you had a cable provider who gave you HBO2, but most providers only offered Disney Channel, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel as their premiums. If you were lucky and had a cable provider who upgraded their system early, you also got Encore, Flix, Starz and in some cases MoviePLEX, which at the time was a time delayed showcase of a different Encore multiplex channel each day.

Disney Channel West was eventually added, there were initially plans to create a "Disney Channel 2" multiplex channel, but those were scrapped when Disney decided to compete with Nickelodeon and migrate to basic cable. Instead they launched the ad supported Toon Disney (now Disney XD)

If anyone's interested about the fate of some of those channels in the listing:
All News Channel - ceased
America's Talking - ceased operations and became MSNBC
Cinemax 2 - Now MoreMAX
CNN International - Eventually started to time share with CNNfn, when CNNfn folded many providers including DirecTV dropped the channel
CourTV - Now TruTV
HBO 3 - Now HBO Signature
MuchMusic USA - Now Fuse
Newsworld International - Now Al Jazeera America
Prime Network Sports - Now FSN
The Family Channel - Now ABC Family
TNN - Now Spike
TRIO - Dropped by DirecTV and eventually ceased operations, NBCU used its transponder slot to launch Sleuth (Now Cloo)

Disney Channel 2 was the name on some systems for Disney Channel west (Directv as well for some time?)

 

[KyL416]

Disney Channel 2 was the name on some systems for Disney Channel west (Directv as well for some time?)

That's just the name in the guide some providers give the West Coast feed, the actual Disney Channel 2 was going to be an additional premium channel that you got with your Disney Channel subscription, like what HBO2 is to HBO. I haven't seen the article about the launch in ages since it's behind one of those archived news paywalls for college research, but if I remember it was going to focus on some more of the classic programming.

Back then Disney was in transition and was still deciding if they were going to remain a family network or shift to entirely kids programming. Once they made the decision to go Basic Cable and go after Nick's audience they scrapped the plans and created Toon Disney as an ad supported channel instead.

 

[James Long]

"Regional Sports Network" a la carte for $7.95 or more. Where would that price be if RSNs were still a la carte?

 

[JoeTheDragon]

"Regional Sports Network" a la carte for $7.95 or more. Where would that price be if RSNs were still a la carte?

was that in or out of market?

 

[James Long]

was that in or out of market?

It didn't identify the RSN in question.

 

[AntAltMike]

After we had all seen enough Zorro reruns and Disney could no longer command the same price as HBO and Showtime, typically $10 a month, WSNet, a program aggregator for small, private cable systems, sent a notice to their properties that Disney was no longer available a la carte, so unless they were informed otherwise, they would start billing the customers $1.25 bulk for their entire base. One of my properties that had been making the minimum buy unit of ten subscriptions, just to placate the three important residents out of 300 who wanted it, "missed the memo" and wound up paying $500 a month for several years. Once I called it to their attention, panic set in. It had to be kept quiet and they had to keep paying it, because if upper management found out they had blown about $20,000, someone would be fired, but as long as paying the monthly bill was business as usual, no one would ever notice, and they continued to pay it until the property eventually.switched over to franchised cable.

Regional Sports channels were typically priced at $10 per subscriber per month in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Chaos ensued when USSB channels transitioned to DirecTV because, for some reason, HBO would not acknowledge the free-to-guest customer contracts until they got new, signed ORIGINALS in their hands. No faxes allowed. So some hotels went without HBO for a couple of days and Federal Express made some money on the fiasco.

One more thing about the expiration of USSB that has never been substantiated but is very plausible is that there was in interval when DirecTV began transmitting a really anemic transponder 30 and 32, which created distribution problems in multiple dwelling units that ordinary residential systems weren't bothered by. The uncorroborated word was that the USSB Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Lifetime, Showtime and HBO contracts had durations that concluded upon the functional expiration of a certain satellite - DirecTV-2, I think - but since DIrecTV-2 had been deactivated to service as a spare once DirecTV-4S became operational, that satellite would not reach the end of its useful life when expected, and so DirecTV could not bring the carriage contracts of those channels into harmony with the terms of the carriage contracts it, itself, had been writing, so they had to bleed its batteries dry for about a year, which gave me fits because when you send a couple of weak transponders into a high power distribution amplifier, the stronger ones, especially the new, local spot beams, intermodulate and rendered transponders 30 and 32 unprocessable.

 

[JoeTheDragon]

What about when primestar was Acquired by directv? And I think that old primestar subs still get added boxes with no outlet / mirroring / lease fees.