WEBVTT

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If you've ever been flipping through channels out of boredom, so yeah, all of us.

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Just kidding, I don't have cable. At some point, you've probably noticed something curious.

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Where the heck is channel one? I mean, when you think about it, it's even weirder than how your

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computer likes to number drives starting with zero. At least it's not skipping any numbers, but

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your TV just acts like the number one doesn't exist. Like get your head out of the sand.

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Well, it turns out that a really long time ago, there was a channel one. Back in the 1940s,

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when commercial television was just starting to become a thing, the FCC in the United States

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assigned certain frequencies to certain channels, with frequencies increasing as you went up the dial.

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Channel one was assigned to the space between 50 and 56 megahertz, so a little ways below today's

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FM radio stations, which start around 88 megahertz. There actually were several TV stations operating

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on channel one in the early and mid 1940s, including what is now WNBC, a major station

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out of New York City. And there's nothing inherently wrong with channel one's frequency

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range that would make it more susceptible to interference or some kind of technical problem.

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But after the end of World War Two, the FCC had to deal with an issue that didn't just

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affect TV broadcasters. You see, demand for different slices of the broadcast spectrum

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boomed, as during the war, radio technology rapidly progressed. And now that the war was over,

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the FCC had to make both radio users and TV broadcasters happy. So the agency decided to cut

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down how many channels were given to TV broadcasts. And remember, back then cable TV wasn't a thing

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yet. So if you were going to watch something, it was going to be over the air on a limited number

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of frequency bands. But even so, the FCC decided that the 18 channels allocated to television

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during the first half of the 1940s was too many. So they cut the number down to 13 in 1946.

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Channel one actually survived this purge, but the FCC needed a piece of spectrum to reserve

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for low power community television designed to cover smaller areas than the major stations.

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So channel one was bumped to an even lower frequency and was only allowed to be used for

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community TV. However, radio and TV were still actually sharing lots of frequencies,

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which caused interference issues. In fact, channel six was the only channel that wasn't shared.

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And to make matters worse, the FCC said that stations could be as close as 80 miles apart,

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exacerbating the interference problem. I could have told you that would have been an issue.

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So the FCC decided to give even more of the spectrum exclusively to radio, the medium of the

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future. And they decided to sacrifice channel one, especially as no low power community TV

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stations were even built between 1946 and 1948 when channel one was axed. Although the FCC could

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have renumbered the channels and made the old channel two the new channel one, they simply

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decided not to bother. And channel one faded into the dustbin of history. Now the convention of not

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having a channel one carried over into analog cable TV. And even today, after the digital transition,

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you don't usually see a whole lot of programming numbered as channel one,

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even though cable operators and digital TV stations have leeway in channel numbering

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and could have put more things on channel one if they wanted to. However, channel one is sometimes

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used as a channel where pay TV subscribers can make on demand selections or for local news

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networks run by the cable provider, such as what spectrum customers get in New York. So hopefully

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this clears up any confusion. I think now I'm going to try and find out why James Bond worked for

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MI6 instead of MI1. David? All right, that's it for this video guys. Thanks for watching. Hey,

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