It's 1981, and this is the start of the major growth era for cable television in most cities. Most places had heard about cable television as a concept at least five years earlier, but actually bringing it to people was not as simple as just stringing cable. Every cable company needed to get a franchise with every town they wanted to serve. Some towns made the process simple - basically rubber stamping the application with little demanded of the company in return. But in more affluent areas and in bureaucracy-heavy cities, the franchise process would go on and on. Tonier suburbs insisted on extra contract clauses requiring cable lines to be buried underground or that any overhead construction in the middle of a right-of-way would not disturb the sanctity of the neighborhood. Most also wanted a higher percentage of cable revenue returned to the town as part of the franchise fee. Others wanted schools and community centers wired for cable for free, and some wanted the cable system to pay for and provide equipment and training for the "PEG" channels - Public Access, Educational Access, and Government Access channels. Cities, in particular, demanded the latter two.
The harder a bargain a town/city demanded, the longer it took for a franchise agreement to be hammered out. The result is that many cities ended up with multiple cable providers providing exclusive service in their town or city, and some towns literally took years to be wired for cable because of bureaucratic delays. So while your neighbor cross town had cable in 1978, you were still waiting in 1982.
In a city like Rochester, one cable system (ATC) provided service in the city itself. People's Cable (sounds Communist) served most of the ring suburbs around the city, including my own, and Warner Cable served some towns on the western side of our county, and Sammons Cable grabbed a number of rural towns in the Finger Lakes region (Sammons loved setting up low capacity cable systems in rural towns and was never a big player in the industry, but was often considered a good business bet because they served communities that often had to erect 50+ foot antenna towers just to receive snowy signals from distant cities.)
In very rural or mountainous areas, where TV reception was always difficult, the benefits of cable television would take a long time (if ever) to reach those regions. It wasn't a problem to wire a town or small city, because houses tended to be clustered together. But back then (and to this day), if you live in a sparsely populated area, chances are you never met the standard requirement for their to be at least x number of houses per mile willing to be cable customers. If you were the only house for a 1/4 mile in any direction, it was not economically feasible to wire you for cable, unless you paid that cost, which could easily be $10,000. Most people passed.
The best alternative, and one that began to become viable for rural America, was the big 10-12' satellite dish in the backyard. This was before DISH and DirecTV. Back then, you had an enormous C-band satellite dish which collected very weak satellite signals that were most commonly received by cable systems and broadcasters. Like a TV antenna, the dish rotated in an arc across the sky to receive multiple satellites, each delivering up to 24 channels of programming. Assuming no trees or other objects impeded the view of your dish, you could easily receive 300+ channels as early as 1981, although a large number of those channels were network feeds, syndicated programs being delivered to subscribing TV stations, news "backhaul" feeds (where you watch a reporter standing around waiting to do their report), etc. But many satellites featured cable networks being fed to cable systems, almost all unscrambled, which meant you could watch for free (in fact, HBO and other pay channels weren't scrambled either then, so you got to watch those for free as well). Channels 9 and 11 from NY (along with many others you probably didn't get on cable) were there as well.
By 1981, the glory years for WPIX and WOR as superstations had arrived. Cable was now available to millions of Americans, and of the clips we've seen thus far, most folks who had cable back then will find what comes next more familiar. WOR-TV adopted yet another new look, this one using computer graphics and a far more inviting look. But at around this time, the battle between RKO, WOR's owner, and the FCC was fully engaged, and it would be this era when New Yorkers one day woke up to see WOR-TV not coming from New York, but rather Secaucus, New Jersey!
First, it's holiday time circa 1981 - time for another workable movie presentation, followed by a bit-worn tape showing off WOR's new flashy ID, then the station management wishing everyone a happy Christmas, and then a promotion for the kind of movie that I always think of when it comes to Christmas... a low budget Godzilla film(?):
