WEBVTT

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if you've ever been flipping through channels out of boredom so yeah all of

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us just kidding i i don't have cable at

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some point you've probably noticed something curious where the heck is

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channel one i mean when you think about it it's even weirder than how your computer likes to

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number drive starting with zero at least it's not skipping any numbers but your

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tv just acts like the number one doesn't exist

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like get your head out of the sand well it turns out that a really long time ago

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there was a channel one back in the 1940s when commercial television was

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just starting to become a thing the fcc in the united states assigned certain

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frequencies to certain channels with frequencies increasing as you went up

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the dial channel one was assigned to the space between 50 and 56 megahertz so a

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little ways below today's fm radio stations which start around 88 megahertz

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there actually were several tv stations operating on channel one in the early

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and mid-1940s including what is now wnbc

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a major station out of new york city and there's nothing inherently wrong with

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channel one's frequency range that would make it more susceptible to interference

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or some kind of technical problem but after the end of world war ii the fcc

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had to deal with an issue that didn't just affect tv broadcasters you see

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demand for different slices of the broadcast spectrum boomed as during the

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war radio technology rapidly progressed and now that the war was over the fcc

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had to make both radio users and tv broadcasters happy so the agency decided

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to cut down how many channels were given to tv broadcasts and remember back then

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cable tv wasn't a thing yet so if you were going to watch something it was

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going to be over the air on a limited number of frequency bands but even so

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the fcc decided that the 18 channels allocated to television during the first

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

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channel 1 actually survived this purge but the fcc needed a piece of spectrum

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to reserve for low power community television designed to cover smaller

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areas than the major stations so channel one was bumped to an even lower

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frequency and was only allowed to be used for community tv however

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radio and tv were still actually sharing

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lots of frequencies which caused interference issues in fact channel 6

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was the only channel that wasn't shared and to make matters worse the fcc said

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that stations could be as close as 80 miles apart exacerbating the

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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

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the medium of the future and they decided to sacrifice channel one

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especially as no low power community tv stations were even built between 1946

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and 1948 when channel 1 was axed

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although the fcc could have renumbered the channels and made the old channel 2

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the new channel 1 they simply decided not to bother and channel 1 faded into

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the dustbin of history now the convention of not having a channel 1

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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 1. even

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though cable operators and digital tv stations have leeway in channel

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numbering and could have put more things on channel one if they wanted to however

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channel one is sometimes used as a channel where pay tv subscribers can

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make on-demand selections or for local news networks run by the cable provider

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such as what spectrum customers get in new york so hopefully this clears up any

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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

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for check it out at LMG.ggpia techwiki today all right

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that's it for this video guys thanks for watching hey you want to learn some more

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