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About LinkBacksAbout the ground TV. Hm, maybe it varied from place to place? It must have been more than two because I distinctly remember thinking 'they have more channels'. I only visited Leningrad and Latvia though. Never went anywhere else in the USSR and it was only in Leningrad that I was able to check the TV channels; it was at a youth hostelOriginally Posted by maxmixiv
We had 2 channels in USSR, named First and Second
But is was more than enough: if First broadcast not very interesting stuff at the moment, you could immediately switch to Second (one-touch action!) The worst possible situation that did occur: some interesting was on BOTH channels! And nothing could be done to "replay" missed programme, because most households had only one TV set, and 0 videorecorders.
Also, having 2 programmes, not 102 made it fairly easy to track most wanted programmes. Simply there was detailed list for the next week in local newspapers.
Never heard about receiving TV off satellites until 1990s.
Yeah, it wasn't so bad really with the 2 channels which we had in Sweden. They put A LOT of time into deciding the kind of programming to put on, so quite often there was actually something good on, despite the lack of choice. Since everybody watched the same stuff, you could talk about it. Sometimes it was actually embarrassing if you hadn't seen something that everyone else watched.
Due to the mixed political situation in Sweden at the time, you could have a gruesome rememberence programme about US atrocities in Vietnam on one channel, and "Dallas" or "Miami Vice" on the other. Followed by some super-artsy Eastern European film where the action moved at 1 km/h...and then a cheezy German soap. The home produced stuff was considered a bit provincial.
But they had the objective of educating and informing people. They were really committed to high quality and culture, even if everybody did not agree with their interpretation of what was worthwhile..
Now, it's just "whatever will bring in the most viewers, let's just show it!". Tasteless and not in the best interest of society, in my opinion. The lowest common denominator will rule, and people's worst instincts will guide the programming until its nothing but sex, violence, prejudice and propaganda.
About the satellites: I don't know, but I remember from ca 1985, as a kid, several of the houses on my street installed a satellite dish. They were hoping to get German TV and were angry that all they could get was stuff in Russian. I remember that the channels were called "Gorisont 1, 2" etc and it was definitely Russian-speaking; no subtitles. Remember watching a bit of it at a friends' despite not understanding any of it. The whole reason (rich) people got satellites back then, was that they wanted commercial TV with American/German content, so it was kind of funny in an ironical sense that all they could actually pick up, was Soviet TV. Later it changed, of course, as Scandinavia got its own satellite.
What a good quote. I did one term of media studies at university and LOVED the topic but I never pursued it. Such a competitive field... But that was just as TV was changing fast, beyond recognition in my neck of the wood. I was totally blown away by CNN at first, but obviously started to notice that sometimes they were just covering things for the sake of it, and ended up repeating themselves, stating the bleeding obvious or essentially wasting time, just to be able to say the coverage was "live".
