And now I'm remembering when you could get the playlist screen up for sometimes minutes at a time, presumably while laserdiscs were being cued. I doubt today's audience could tolerate that, they'd rush to change channel.
Are they actually using old idents or just making "retro" ones with the old logo? I remember the original bouncing cube ID but it does make me wince when they turn the "retro" aesthetic up to 11...
I've still never quite found out the date (or even year) when music channels abandoned the viewer selection aspect in favour of pre-made playlists. I think it was shortly after the advent on Youtube in the mid-late 2000s, when the idea of calling/texting a number became redundant - especially so with Spotify's quick rise to success at the very end of that decade.
It holds a lot of memories for me as my first introduction to chart music, and for a while I had a VHS mixtape recorded from the channel in 1999 with my then-favourite songs - Steps, The Cartoons and Fatboy Slim were the first few from memory. My uncle also made me one a couple years later using the channel with various rock and nu-metal songs interspersed with Britney Spears and S Club 7.
Many surprise European hits of the late 90s to mid-2000s owe their unexpected UK success to the channel for giving them airplay that other radio/TV stations wouldn't - ok, the likes of Scooter and O-Zone aren't to many's tastes but The Box helped them to top 3 chart places and hundreds of thousands of sales.
It was 2007 when they finally got rid of it, roughly the same time Channel 4 bought their share in them, though the viewer selection aspect had been taking less and less of the channels airtime before then anyway. And I seem to remember reading towards the end the viewer selection wasn't a jukebox any more as such, but they'd look at the number of selections different songs had and built a playlist around that. Remember it was around the same time as the premium rate phone in scandals, which may well have had something to do with it as well.
And I can remember for the first year or so after they switched to their new system in 2000 it would crash frequently and they'd have to reboot it, which would mean a good 5-10 minutes of blank screens & flickering colours every time it happened (again, sadly something I never recorded to VHS!). And they always played the same songs when they came back, one night I remember Same Old Brand New You by a1 being played probably about 10 times because it kept crashing, and sometimes it didn't even make it to the end of the song before it crashed again.
I remember those Pioneer Laser Jukes, there was one in Butlins in the 90s, and there was one in the hotel I stayed in in Spain in 1999, though it hadn't been updated since late 1997.
I wonder if any of the original laserdiscs from The Box are still around, especially as they must have made loads of them over the years, with all the various videos, adverts and Box promotional shows, and multiple sets of them for each cable company's variation on the channel. There must have been thousands of discs made for them over the 8 or so years the laserdisc system was in use.
CC
ccskycomedy
I wonder why they are looking back 27 years of the channel? Is it closing soon due to now being fully owned by Channel 4?