Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Channel One?

Here is a question posed by Maria that might be very easy to answer with a little research, but I don't know the answer off the top of my head:

Why is there never a channel one on TV?

I imagine the reason is technical or has something to do with industry regulations for the television broadcast industry as a whole, but I will leave it up to you guys to find out.

1 comment:

Michael Arjona said...

This is a comment from Chris Hellmann since he is experiencing techincal difficulties with posting it himself:
"The reason there is no channel one on cable goes back to the 1940s. TV signals were sent by the same waves as radios. The megahertz of channel one and radio coincided. The FCC chair at the time, James Fly, gave channel one to radio rather than TV. He believed bandwidth should deliver information and entertainment to every woodland shack before it delivered flashy TV to people who could, in 1939, afford a $600 set. The FCC then gave TV 13 channels right on top of FM radio.

In 1948, the FCC moved FM up to 88 through 108 MHz,like it is today. The remaining channel one was given to dispatchers and police. TV now had channels up to around 83, but were usually empty, until major cable companies emerged.

Cable, for the most part, has become outdated. From the dish to digital cable, people can get hundreds of channels without interfering with radio. With Comcast Digital Cable, channel one is the information channel. "