The Saddest Prevue Guide That Ever Lived

[@PajamaFrix]

Here's some speculation on what i believe happened for anybody who may be curious: Typically on other videos of the Prevue Guide from this time period, there's a blinking white dot next to the clock on the top. The blinking represents data being received by the Amiga. (on later incarnations of the guide, it's in the right corner of the screen, usually next to the third timeslot.) While the dot appears on and off in this recording, either the data was too scrambled for the software or the Amiga to recognize, or could be past the 'listen' command. However, this only occurs for only a few portions of the recording, as most of the recording does not have that indicator. (Additionally, there's also the brief glimpse of the Diagnostics Mode screen at around 7:13, which shows only 20 total commands--not counting the 36 Ctrl commands--were received during its uptime.) One other idea I had (also related) was that from what I could find, apparently the data that Prevue displayed was encoded in sound, sent through C-band, received locally and decoded to an audio demodulator of sorts. The C-band feed seems to have 1 audio channel and 5 audio subcarriers, two are used for the data (EPG & CTRL (top-hand portion of the screen; for showing show information during Prevue Tonight) respectively) and the other three is for actual audio (left and right audio channels for (different programs and national ads) and one for background audio/music.) If I had to take another guess something was probably messed up somehow (i guess either a cable issue, interference, or something else that I didn't mention. your guesses are as good as mine) and thus is the reason behind the fuzzy audio and missing listings. I wonder if CCV in West Covina never checked this out before switching out their old Prevue system and thus led to stuff like this happening on occasion? Still unsure. Take these theories with a grain of salt though. I never worked for a cable company or anything related to Prevue (besides working with various dump of the software, most succeeding the version in this video.) This is mostly speculation and other things. I'm just making educated guesses and some knowledge of how Prevue functioned back in the day.

[@MacBack123]

Woah, hello PajamaFrix! Can you eventually upload the Hot Pix, Coming Soon, etc banners for PC Prevue? Im trying to get my own Prevue setup in my house, and im using an old laptop to do it. (Note: The forum validation email isnt sending. Something up with the servers maybe?)

[@lulugamer8082]

WOW, YOU JUST FIGURED OUT WHAT HAPPENED!!!

[@Ryoga2K]

I love how it lists the satellite names and transponders when it is not properly configured

[@DanTheMan1985ful]

Somehow, I think Prevue Guide/Channel was meant for those that had a Satellite Dish.

[@und4287]

@@DanTheMan1985ful The satellite listings were provided as a courtesy for C-band satellite dish owners.

[@samicrusader]

@@DanTheMan1985ful the satellite feed is used for the split video at the top of the guide

[@MinifigNewsguy]

In later versions of the single time scroll, they added a message at the end of the scroll cycle something like "if you see this message, contact your cable provider" indicating the C-band listings is a failover if the headend Prevue system fails (and as others mentioned it's splits the trailers and promos on the upper third of the screen.)

[@Matryoshkarina]

I'm turning this into a children's storybook and none of you can stop me.

[@MacBack123]

**insert duke nukem saying that**

[@KacyCats19]

Good luck with that

[@NickyClassicBackArchives]

DO IT~!

[@luisreyes1963]

I'll wait for the PIXAR movie. 😅

[@mrzero1982]

In Memphis, it would fuck up after a storm. Never failed. Like lightning would ALWAYS hit it.

[@pcguy619]

Hrm... something tells me the headend was overheated. Maybe if they would have ziptied a damn fan to the vents, it would have been fine....

[@mcydodge919]

That is just PATHETIC! On the bright side, the opening portion has the clearest version of the 1988 music I've ever heard!

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

For me, it would be the Win95 Start-up sequence whenever my cable company's (or the local newspaper) little info channel that did nothing but weather forecasts and ads conked down.

[@CosmicPanchi]

*distorted music* When prevue guide dabs

[@TheGamerWithMore]

If you look very carefully after reboot, you can see a dialog saying "Disk is 69% full" then the OSD (on screen display) gets scrambled with the music. This is a really cool guide and I want to see it have some hit and miss bits here and there. Quick Edit: Also looks like the tech is a computer scam artist, not knowing what to do. Turn off the Amiga then turn it back on. Or just turn it over and open the back panel, you can then access the motherboard (if you call it that) and see if there is any capacitors leaking.

[@TheGamerWithMore]

***** I have no idea honestly.

[@forgive_me_for_my_past]

Nice.

[@Kurzov]

The places I find people I know. Heh.

[@patcollins4023]

It *was* Friday, 13 March, so you couldn't blame them.

[@WindowsGG]

bro got the cleanest version of this iconic cable song how

[@lulugamer8082]

idk

[@RQBtv]

After all, it /was/ Friday the 13th.

[@ericariley1696]

At 6:30, "Dream Images" by Dwight Mikkelsen plays in the background of the Psychic Talk commercial.

[@Calenrandir]

2:56 I had a VHS that had that Jetsons movie followed by Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey recorded onto it from around this time. Crazy to see them advertised together like this!

[@JosephASobora]

Shame to see Prevue Guide in a mess like this, the cable company in West Covina, must have suffered a lot of problems with the Amiga system.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

I always get the impression small town cable outlets operated this way, understaffed on weekends, temp people who are given orders from those that were in-the-know and nothing else, and one guy blows off to the bar leaving everything on someone else to handle to no avail. And it all probably came down to a loose wire or something that needed replacing.

[@cellytron]

Thank god I never saw this in my area. I probably would have perished from the shock to my tiny child brain. As an adult it’s still creepy AF to hear my fave music like this

[@SouthwesternEagle]

Not always. These systems were from 1987. If a capacitor (which were all electrolytic back then) had even a slight malfunction, it'd screw the whole system up just enough to make it somewhat glitchy. That's why some old machines just freeze or glitch for no apparent reason.

[@SammyDarknessGaming]

To be honest, since the memory was in a bad place, the guide had a distorted sound.

[@SammyDarknessGaming]

+RiverNix123 I'd say you would've just thrown a brick at the satellite audio thingy since it contains the distorted sound. It would make it better.

[@Lethaltail]

"Special Functions -> Reboot computer" Would've done nothing but the option WAS there.

[@SammyDarknessGaming]

+Nicholas Lovan (Techinicabor) maybe pressing it would give an error

[@Lethaltail]

+Pajama Network It says to go off-air for 1-2 minutes, asks for Y/N, then resets the Amiga. They probably just didn't know it existed. That or it wasn't in this version. It probably was.

[@SammyDarknessGaming]

Nicholas Lovan i tried doing that in the amiga emulation, and it rebooted. i just wish they would've done that instead of doing a hard reset.

[@FairPlay137]

The Amiga probably rebooted itself due to...whatever things went wrong.

[@MarkShannonroad_videos]

I can hear the technician on the phone with tech support right now... Cable dude: When I select "Edit Ads" it tells me "Local Edit not available". Tech Support: Try changing speeds. Cable Dude: Now the screen has green crap all over it. Tech Support: Try rebooting it. Again! Cable dude: Oh, to Hell with it!

[@PIXPromosMore]

Arby's: We have the Cercopithecoids!

[@JasonDelarosa2000]

#CercopithecoidCraft 😂

[@DoctorLemon]

God, that music is so distorted! How could they not know how to tune their satellite receiver correctly?

[@kargaroc386]

Maybe the weather channel had a point with its bespoke custom hardware that, nevertheless, actually worked. the weatherstars had a watchdog feature that would auto-reboot the system if Bad Things happened. I suppose something like that would be rather difficult to hack onto an Amiga. Or maybe the software just sucked, idk.

[@MinifigNewsguy]

there you go... if it weren't for Prevue, TWC wouldn't had a point. Hyperlocal technology couldn't been built for scale with high quality for a number of years. Even TWC had to move towards off the shelf after the WeatherSTAR XL was a hard proposition to some of the medium sized providers, not only $6,500 tag, but the 8U rack/SGI Onyx custom build. One has to admit that with A2000 computers along with the stable Prevue code with the "grid" era following 1993, it was very reliable. Even if there was Guru Mediation messages, a system crash wouldn't take down the local feed of Prevue for a least a period of time.

[@robmclean4352]

Friday the 13th, of course...

[@GroverKent]

The distorted theme sounds like musical farts.

[@imrustyokay]

Looks like the Disney afternoon was on.

[@JasonDelarosa2000]

Every day they're out there makin' DuckTales, woo-oo!

[@SnabbKassa]

Die Trollen wusste nicht, wie man den schrecklichen Klang ausbessert!

[@zachNet]

I don’t get why only the music sounded distorted and all the ads sounded fine if all of the audio came from the satellite feed. Or was the music on a separate audio track than the ads? And only the audio track with the music was screwy? If that were the case, why does the Amiga get the cues to switch the audio channel but no other data? I have too many questions after watching this video twice, lol.

[@pcguy619]

TheGamerWithMore , that could also be a bad audio cap that failed due to high heat, but thats pretty uncommon, as standard electrolytic caps can stand up to 200 F on average.

[@deathtoll5000x]

CHANGE THE BLOODY RAM YOU FOOLS!

[@DanTheMan1985ful]

I'm kinda mind blown on this was Prevue Guide/Channel meant originally for Satellite or Cable Subscribers? I remember using a Satellite Dish before DirecTV and Dish Network the screen would be split into three with the preview on the top left and another on the top right (blue screen with the information if you're watching it on cable) and the program guide at the bottom. If it's on satellite the program guide will go through a loop of satellite calls and their transponder channels of what's on whatever they can find. If it's on cable it goes through a loop of channels for that cable company of that particular area channels 2 to 78+ and had a summary for its premium and pay-per-view services. For those of you who don't know what a transponder signal or channel is... think of it this way if you watched Nickelodeon on cable on the east coast which is Nick East and watching it on Time Warner Cable in the Raleigh-Durham area on channel 43, that's because for that area it operates on channel 43 therefore programmed to be on that channel. Now if it's satellite you have to look up the satellite call which is F4 SATCOM 4 Transponder/Channel 3. Nick West on the west coast operates on... well used to on F3 SATCOM 3 Transponder/Channel 18.

[@AEMoreira81]

+DanTheMan1985ful I think satellite as it had channels that were in many cases regional networks. The channel, of course, is now called Pop.

[@pcjabber]

+DanTheMan1985ful Ahh the good old days :-D. I take it you're in the Raleigh area?

[@DanTheMan1985ful]

Used to live towards Raleigh

[@und4287]

Both. The listings with transponders were provided as a courtesy for satellite dish owners. An Amiga at each cable company would overlay local listings instead.

[@DanTheMan1985ful]

@@und4287 Yeah but if you owned Satellite during these days, you'd have to guess the channel it was going to be on. Not everyone had access to internet in those days. If you needed a channel guide for Satellite, you had to subscribe to "Orbit" or similar publications monthly.

[@SammyDarknessGaming]

Look closely at 8:45, you can kinda see the Prevue Guide logo.

[@someperson42]

They should have just turned the thing off -- the sat feed that sometimes shows through was probably more useful.

[@YayAkiba]

Quite often you would see the public access channels show an Amiga desktop, the "insert kickstart disk" screen, or a Windows 95 desktop(in later days).

[@thesnare100]

You can kind of hear music in the static kind of, heh

[@YayAkiba]

I had CC in the twin cities back in the day. Do you have any videos from when they had glitches on the AP News Plus channel? Every couple of months, all the vector graphics would go off track & it looked like a bad LOGO session. This was around the mid-80s.

[@GrindzMuzik]

I was a kid at the time. I think I do remember this constantly being a problem.

[@friendlyfiregaming4601]

I bet some undergraduate from some crappy community college was working on it at the time... LOL!

[@junkboxxxxxx]

give these people air

[@corrupt200]

haha my dad had an Amiga from 1989 to approx 1995. When he got his windows 3.1 laptop in 1992, the Amiga just lay around. I just used it to type "Say" commands to tease my family friends

[@ABCEasyas--]

100th comment! Did the cable company even bother installing new hardware and relaunching Prevue Channel or did they have some other channel guide thing like TV Guide on Screen?

[@megamanfan3]

7:00 Now that's a cool menu.

[@chriswideman4284]

In my hometown of Greenwood, SC, we didn't have the Prevue Guide until January 1994 when it became the Prevue Channel I think. We had "Cable TeleGuide" in lieu of Prevue Guide. They showed local advertisement on the Top of the screen and the channel listings on the bottom with instrumental adult contemporary music. Good old days!

[@KyonShow]

Friday the 13th was the day?

[@anteldrobat3880]

that theme music. and the anouncer.

[@ryanpascual9598]

WARNING: Prevue guide failure. If you are a cable subscriber and see this message, your Prevue Guide service is experiencing some technical difficulty.

[@wxsyz]

This is the best version of this track I've ever heard. Does anyone know the title/artist?

[@und4287]

It's from what was the James & Aster audio library.

[@thesnare100]

@RetroToledo Why are there only a few mega-cable companies nowadays, guess comcast and charter paid them good money (or they had to due to financial trouble) to sell out

[@keiyakins]

Holy shit those cats at the end, I had one as a kid! :D

[@breakpack]

Wow I remember this kind of crash in my local area as well (except for the bad audio)! Also, shout out to West Covina, I lived there a year back in 2003!

[@termitesc.aardwolf3644]

I see Jetsons: The Movie.

[@corproblox3874]

3:49 Home alone!!

[@ETownLive]

Wow, talk about shots being fired.

[@thesnare100]

@Kitsuneranger He/she said his cable technicians were particularly incompetent. Yes, crashes would happen sometimes, I remember seeing some, but it wasn't like this video shows all the time- for me

[@JosephASobora]

A parody of "Gone With The Wind".

[@joemillerftw]

They ever heard of a kernel panic?!?! hardware failure for the win, it's not the software guys :D I used to run Amiga systems in broadcasting, those things are so underappreciated for that they did for television.

[@thesnare100]

@RetroToledo they offer cable internet of course (I hope!) unless you can get FIOS

[@MadameSomnambule]

This is basically me on my worst mental health days.

[@willdav713]

Warner Cable had this in Houston back in 1986. It wasn't Prevue Guide. Because they were once QUBE they were ahead of the time. But for 1992, this is very sad. Commadore Amiga? They must have spent all their capital on Algore the Atari Democrat.

[@reydelacruzplaylistscartoo2935]

it's scary music 😨

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@thesnare100 No, we get AT&T's service here instead.

[@sirkeithv1112]

That music was still fire though 🔥🔥🔥

[@itogi]

I love this video.

[@PTH4Fun]

What was that prevue commercial about @ 11:08?

[@Kitsuneranger]

LOL, My god this is pathetic! I remember Preview Guide, but i don't recall it being this half-assed!

[@Mrtraveler01]

This happened on Friday the 13th. Coincidence?

[@ashleycordeiro3199]

Yep

[@JasonDelarosa2000]

Your last video until a Johnny clip.

[@kargaroc386]

What a strange video

[@MrIveyIsBonkers]

This is depressing. The listings barely worked, so it wasn't useful as a guide. The promos can barely be heard, to add to that. The music is distorted so it's not good as a background channel. It literally has NO purpose.

[@cjpwolf2436]

Talespin on WSBK(Boston MA) and WPIX (New York NY)

[@siouxmoux3]

Steve bryant at the end on QVC!

[@coreyadams8508]

Where's that QVC Footage, HappyHappyFunball?

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@thesnare100 Seems like it (mergers, buyouts, backstabberies). There's still a local one where I live that's never been bought out for most of it's lifespan (about 45 years now), they're owned by the local paper otherwise. en(dot)wikipedia(dot)org/wiki/Buckeye_CableSystem I'm only glad I don't have to put up with those other familiar guys.

[@autex.lewis06]

2:56 OMG! I see KTVT my local CBS Station!

[@ccateni28]

QVC... I would rather use prevue guide in 2018 than watch qvc.

[@MarkMeadows90]

Some good looking girls from 3:22 to 3:47

[@PhilMante]

The girls of Hawaiian tropic...some sort of Bikini model competition.

[@JasonDelarosa2000]

Harley Underwood and Bart Simpson would lose it and drool their guts out...

[@PTH4Fun]

Thanks a bundle.

[@4HBirtcher]

Cable companies had nothing to do with the prevue channel's problems, it's the prevue channel itself!!

[@etekweb]

No. Since content is localized to each region, there is no external "Prevue Guide channel" feed like other TV channels. Instead, each cable company running Prevue Guide had a headend computer that ran Prevue Guide's software. They would then output the display from that to a channel directly. The Amiga computer that runs the feed was provided by Prevue though. So you could split the blame between the two, though other cable providers were able to keep their systems running better than this at least.