AB
This is the clip of the dying days of NTSC era The Box in 1999. The downward spiral started with the playlist cut from 500 videos to about 150.
Also clips from the Trouble channel from the early days. It wasn't the same after TNBC/Peter Engel productions ended and moved from Kids section of the Sky EPG to Entertainment.
Also clips from the Trouble channel from the early days. It wasn't the same after TNBC/Peter Engel productions ended and moved from Kids section of the Sky EPG to Entertainment.
Last edited by ab25170 on 2 October 2016 7:15pm
JA
The really sad thing is that happened not very long after we got cable, a few weeks at the most. The strange thing is during most of 1999, something seemed to change about the channel's presentation on practically a weekly basis (this video comes from that period, those idents lasted a few months during the summer of 99)- it only settled down when they did a full relaunch at the end of the year.
One thing I remember from 1999 is they had this American bloke that read out the Box Tops top 10, and he was always really happy and cheerful. Then one week he sounded really miserable and I thought "I wonder ih he's been sacked", and indeed that was the last time we heard him. They got rid of features like Beat Box (an R&B chart) and the old US idents around the same time, and the "Box Talk"s stopped being selectable as part of the playlist and just appeared at set times of the day instead.
Let's be honest, ALL of the music channels where much better back then, not just The Box, but MTV and VH1 too. Not just because MTV still showed music, but they showed a wide variety of music-related programming that's not replicated on any music channel these days. Now it's mostly just rubbish "themed strands" and endlessly repeated "top 10/20/40s" churned out, and with no presenters. Vintage TV probably tries the hardest these days, but it still pales in comparion with pre-early 2000s MTV & VH1, and even then their focus is on older music not more recent stuff.
This is the clip of the dying days of NTSC era The Box in 1999. The downward spiral started with the playlist cut from 500 videos about 150.
The really sad thing is that happened not very long after we got cable, a few weeks at the most. The strange thing is during most of 1999, something seemed to change about the channel's presentation on practically a weekly basis (this video comes from that period, those idents lasted a few months during the summer of 99)- it only settled down when they did a full relaunch at the end of the year.
One thing I remember from 1999 is they had this American bloke that read out the Box Tops top 10, and he was always really happy and cheerful. Then one week he sounded really miserable and I thought "I wonder ih he's been sacked", and indeed that was the last time we heard him. They got rid of features like Beat Box (an R&B chart) and the old US idents around the same time, and the "Box Talk"s stopped being selectable as part of the playlist and just appeared at set times of the day instead.
Let's be honest, ALL of the music channels where much better back then, not just The Box, but MTV and VH1 too. Not just because MTV still showed music, but they showed a wide variety of music-related programming that's not replicated on any music channel these days. Now it's mostly just rubbish "themed strands" and endlessly repeated "top 10/20/40s" churned out, and with no presenters. Vintage TV probably tries the hardest these days, but it still pales in comparion with pre-early 2000s MTV & VH1, and even then their focus is on older music not more recent stuff.
Last edited by james-2001 on 2 October 2016 7:25pm - 2 times in total
BH
BillyH
Founding member
It's astonishing to remember how
incredible
The Box felt at the time, certainly for me back in 1999 - the very idea of being able to just enter a three-digit code on a phone and your selected song (eventually) loading on screen felt like the absolute peak of TV interactivity. One minor thing that I especially loved - the digits would appear on screen at the exact seconds you entered them, rather than all at once, making it even more like music television you controlled.
Even just a few years later, with the rise of mp3s, Youtube and eventually Spotify, the above sounds hundreds of years old. My favourite music channel memory is sometime around 2003, when one of the channels (Magic I think) went completely nuts for seemingly no reason and played Don't You Want Me by the Human League over and over again on a loop - was the system broken, was it some kind of gag/special event or did some obsessive Human League fan constantly call up and rack up a huge phone bill?
When did the interactivity element disappear from these channels - sometime around the late 2000s? I remember it slowly fizzling out until pre-made playlists became the norm.
Even just a few years later, with the rise of mp3s, Youtube and eventually Spotify, the above sounds hundreds of years old. My favourite music channel memory is sometime around 2003, when one of the channels (Magic I think) went completely nuts for seemingly no reason and played Don't You Want Me by the Human League over and over again on a loop - was the system broken, was it some kind of gag/special event or did some obsessive Human League fan constantly call up and rack up a huge phone bill?
When did the interactivity element disappear from these channels - sometime around the late 2000s? I remember it slowly fizzling out until pre-made playlists became the norm.
JA
I think Challenge cut that bit out when they repeated that series recently.
Such a direct,, clear explanation for the black bars. Nowadays they'd cut to a patronising VT.
I think Challenge cut that bit out when they repeated that series recently.
JA
It wasn't that long after Channel 4 took over, I don't think, plus it was around the same time as the premium rate phone scandals, so that might have had something to do with it too.
I seem to remember hearing towards the end, it wasn't a jukebox as such any more, they used the selections to gauge how popular things were when compiling playlists. I could be wrong though!
When did the interactivity element disappear from these channels - sometime around the late 2000s? I remember it slowly fizzling out until pre-made playlists became the norm.
It wasn't that long after Channel 4 took over, I don't think, plus it was around the same time as the premium rate phone scandals, so that might have had something to do with it too.
I seem to remember hearing towards the end, it wasn't a jukebox as such any more, they used the selections to gauge how popular things were when compiling playlists. I could be wrong though!
NW
The benefit of being a cable subscriber was that if you wanted to call The Box it was literally a short code number, where as on Sky it used to be an 08 number. The Teletext used to be quite detailed from memory. The picture quality was always very NTSC, but I guess that was part of the charm. The Box wasn't really the same once it became a national service.
Worth noting that cable had 3 music channels full time, satellite had two. VH1, MTV and The Box, as seen demonstrated here:
It's astonishing to remember how
incredible
The Box felt at the time, certainly for me back in 1999 - the very idea of being able to just enter a three-digit code on a phone and your selected song (eventually) loading on screen felt like the absolute peak of TV interactivity. One minor thing that I especially loved - the digits would appear on screen at the exact seconds you entered them, rather than all at once, making it even more like music television you controlled.
Even just a few years later, with the rise of mp3s, Youtube and eventually Spotify, the above sounds hundreds of years old. My favourite music channel memory is sometime around 2003, when one of the channels (Magic I think) went completely nuts for seemingly no reason and played Don't You Want Me by the Human League over and over again on a loop - was the system broken, was it some kind of gag/special event or did some obsessive Human League fan constantly call up and rack up a huge phone bill?
When did the interactivity element disappear from these channels - sometime around the late 2000s? I remember it slowly fizzling out until pre-made playlists became the norm.
Even just a few years later, with the rise of mp3s, Youtube and eventually Spotify, the above sounds hundreds of years old. My favourite music channel memory is sometime around 2003, when one of the channels (Magic I think) went completely nuts for seemingly no reason and played Don't You Want Me by the Human League over and over again on a loop - was the system broken, was it some kind of gag/special event or did some obsessive Human League fan constantly call up and rack up a huge phone bill?
When did the interactivity element disappear from these channels - sometime around the late 2000s? I remember it slowly fizzling out until pre-made playlists became the norm.
The benefit of being a cable subscriber was that if you wanted to call The Box it was literally a short code number, where as on Sky it used to be an 08 number. The Teletext used to be quite detailed from memory. The picture quality was always very NTSC, but I guess that was part of the charm. The Box wasn't really the same once it became a national service.
Worth noting that cable had 3 music channels full time, satellite had two. VH1, MTV and The Box, as seen demonstrated here:
JA
That varied between cable companies. I know us (Diamond Cable/NTL Nottingham) could dial 1700 (and it was free), but my family in Derby on C&W only had a premium rate number to call. There was no Teletext on the Nottingham version either (I think there was on the Derby one though).
One thing I do remember about the Nottingham Box, certainly when we got cable anyway, is for some reason we didn't get some videos for several weeks- so they'd be promoted on Box Fresh, and you'd see them on the Breaking Out Of The Box and Box Tops segment- but you couldn't select or see it. They'd appear eventually though.
I know the Nottingham Box switched to the national/Sky version in the Autumn of 1999, not sure when other cable companies did. I do know some were still running their own service in the Autumn of 2000 (still using the NTSC/Laserdisc system after the national one had switched to the modern computer playout).
And another thing I remember about the "national" box in 1999/2000 is quite frequently the beginnings of videos would get cut off (which means the song title graphics, which were burnt in, and the selection number, which was generated live, didn't appear at the same time)- which never happened when The Box was local.
And one thing I remember is when they first switched to the computer playout system, it used to crash ALL the time, so you'd frequently get periods of black screens & flashing images while they were rebooting it, and they clearly had some pre-programmed playlist (which changed every week) as the same songs would play after coming back online before calls came in. I certainly remember one evening seeing "Same Old Brand New You" by a1 at least 10 times, as it was the first song on that playlist (often the system crashing again before it had even got to the end of that song!).
And during that 2000/01 era they'd often switch to a secondary/backup system briefly (that often wasn't connected to the phone lines, so you'd just see the pre-determined playlist), and you could tell when that was on-air as the selection number in the title caption was blue rather than red. After a while it stopped crashing as much, though there was certainly the occasional crash into around 2002/2003.
The Box is something I remember a lot of, as when we had analogue cable (1999-2001), it was the only music channel we had (apart from November 1999 & 2000 when MTV was the monthly guest channel, and April 2000 when it was UK Play).
I sort of wish I'd caught more of this on video. I do have a lot of video I taped from The Box from 1999-2001, but they're just music videos of songs I liked, not any of the surrounding presentation. All I have of that is the "follows shortly" caption they put during faults and when they were updating the laserdisc system, and the ful-screen playlist they used to put up (presumebly while laserdiscs were being cued).
The benefit of being a cable subscriber was that if you wanted to call The Box it was literally a short code number, where as on Sky it used to be an 08 number.
That varied between cable companies. I know us (Diamond Cable/NTL Nottingham) could dial 1700 (and it was free), but my family in Derby on C&W only had a premium rate number to call. There was no Teletext on the Nottingham version either (I think there was on the Derby one though).
One thing I do remember about the Nottingham Box, certainly when we got cable anyway, is for some reason we didn't get some videos for several weeks- so they'd be promoted on Box Fresh, and you'd see them on the Breaking Out Of The Box and Box Tops segment- but you couldn't select or see it. They'd appear eventually though.
I know the Nottingham Box switched to the national/Sky version in the Autumn of 1999, not sure when other cable companies did. I do know some were still running their own service in the Autumn of 2000 (still using the NTSC/Laserdisc system after the national one had switched to the modern computer playout).
And another thing I remember about the "national" box in 1999/2000 is quite frequently the beginnings of videos would get cut off (which means the song title graphics, which were burnt in, and the selection number, which was generated live, didn't appear at the same time)- which never happened when The Box was local.
And one thing I remember is when they first switched to the computer playout system, it used to crash ALL the time, so you'd frequently get periods of black screens & flashing images while they were rebooting it, and they clearly had some pre-programmed playlist (which changed every week) as the same songs would play after coming back online before calls came in. I certainly remember one evening seeing "Same Old Brand New You" by a1 at least 10 times, as it was the first song on that playlist (often the system crashing again before it had even got to the end of that song!).
And during that 2000/01 era they'd often switch to a secondary/backup system briefly (that often wasn't connected to the phone lines, so you'd just see the pre-determined playlist), and you could tell when that was on-air as the selection number in the title caption was blue rather than red. After a while it stopped crashing as much, though there was certainly the occasional crash into around 2002/2003.
The Box is something I remember a lot of, as when we had analogue cable (1999-2001), it was the only music channel we had (apart from November 1999 & 2000 when MTV was the monthly guest channel, and April 2000 when it was UK Play).
I sort of wish I'd caught more of this on video. I do have a lot of video I taped from The Box from 1999-2001, but they're just music videos of songs I liked, not any of the surrounding presentation. All I have of that is the "follows shortly" caption they put during faults and when they were updating the laserdisc system, and the ful-screen playlist they used to put up (presumebly while laserdiscs were being cued).