On Wed, 16 Aug 2017 18:02:40 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

When I was growing up in New Haven, we had Channel 8, WNHC, the local
ABC affiliate. If you wanted more than that, you had a switch on the
back of your TV to switch to another antenna that was aimed towards New
York City, from which you could get very good reception of New York
stations, including Channel 2 (CBS), Channel 4 (NBC) Channel 5 (Dumont),
Channel 7 (ABC), Channel 9 (WOR), Channel 11 (WPIX) and Channel 13
(forget the affiliation). Channel 3 was a Hartford station and CBS
affiliate.

DC had 4
WRC NBC 4,
WTTG 5 Independent
WMAL(later WJLA) ABC 7
WTOP CBS 9,
Later they added WETA the PBS channel 3 and Ch 20 another independent.

You could get 2, 11 and 13 from Baltimore but it was snowy and the
same stuff as the 3 networks in DC had most of the time.

If you put a big antenna on a pole with a rotor, you could spin around
and get a Redskins game from Richmond (Ch 6) but it was not a very
good picture. That was before they lifted the blackout ban.

I remember when they came out with "Super TV" Channel 50, a
subscription service. There was always someone hacking that signal.
Originally they just buried the horizontal (vertical?) sync pulse in
the sound track and that was trivial to hack. They it got more
complicated. I had the first box but it wasn't worth it to chase it
when they changed. By then I had a BetaMax (circa 75-6) and I was
getting my movies on tape shortly after that.
Originally it was just a few early Beta people swapping tapes around
and then when the Beta 2 came out (77-8?) they started video clubs
where you paid to rent movies, one way or another. Some had a big
subscription rate with all you can eat included, others were pretty
cheap to join and you paid per movie,