If you've ever been flipping through channels out of boredom, so yeah, all of us.
Just kidding, I don't have cable. At some point, you've probably noticed something curious.
Where the heck is channel one? I mean, when you think about it, it's even weirder than how your
computer likes to number drives starting with zero. At least it's not skipping any numbers, but
your TV just acts like the number one doesn't exist. Like get your head out of the sand.
Well, it turns out that a really long time ago, there was a channel one. Back in the 1940s,
when commercial television was just starting to become a thing, the FCC in the United States
assigned certain frequencies to certain channels, with frequencies increasing as you went up the dial.
Channel one was assigned to the space between 50 and 56 megahertz, so a little ways below today's
FM radio stations, which start around 88 megahertz. There actually were several TV stations operating
on channel one in the early and mid 1940s, including what is now WNBC, a major station
out of New York City. And there's nothing inherently wrong with channel one's frequency
range that would make it more susceptible to interference or some kind of technical problem.
But after the end of World War Two, the FCC had to deal with an issue that didn't just
affect TV broadcasters. You see, demand for different slices of the broadcast spectrum
boomed, as during the war, radio technology rapidly progressed. And now that the war was over,
the FCC had to make both radio users and TV broadcasters happy. So the agency decided to cut
down how many channels were given to TV broadcasts. And remember, back then cable TV wasn't a thing
yet. So if you were going to watch something, it was going to be over the air on a limited number
of frequency bands. But even so, the FCC decided that the 18 channels allocated to television
during the first half of the 1940s was too many. So they cut the number down to 13 in 1946.
Channel one actually survived this purge, but the FCC needed a piece of spectrum to reserve
for low power community television designed to cover smaller areas than the major stations.
So channel one was bumped to an even lower frequency and was only allowed to be used for
community TV. However, radio and TV were still actually sharing lots of frequencies,
which caused interference issues. In fact, channel six was the only channel that wasn't shared.
And to make matters worse, the FCC said that stations could be as close as 80 miles apart,
exacerbating the interference problem. I could have told you that would have been an issue.
So the FCC decided to give even more of the spectrum exclusively to radio, the medium of the
future. And they decided to sacrifice channel one, especially as no low power community TV
stations were even built between 1946 and 1948 when channel one was axed. Although the FCC could
have renumbered the channels and made the old channel two the new channel one, they simply
decided not to bother. And channel one faded into the dustbin of history. Now the convention of not
having a channel one carried over into analog cable TV. And even today, after the digital transition,
you don't usually see a whole lot of programming numbered as channel one,
even though cable operators and digital TV stations have leeway in channel numbering
and could have put more things on channel one if they wanted to. However, channel one is sometimes
used as a channel where pay TV subscribers can make on demand selections or for local news
networks run by the cable provider, such as what spectrum customers get in New York. So hopefully
this clears up any confusion. I think now I'm going to try and find out why James Bond worked for
MI6 instead of MI1. David? All right, that's it for this video guys. Thanks for watching. Hey,
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