if you've ever been flipping through channels out of boredom so yeah all of
us just kidding i 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 drive 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 ii 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 1 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 6
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 1 was axed
although the fcc could have renumbered the channels and made the old channel 2
the new channel 1 they simply decided not to bother and channel 1 faded into
the dustbin of history now the convention of not having a channel 1
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 1. 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
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