[James2001]

One thing that's unfortunate, I've heard plenty about the old laserdisc system The Box used to use until 2000, but I've never seen any photos or videos of it. And as most cable companies ran the channel themselves from their own headends, there would have seen several systems out there. And presumably god knows how many laserdiscs themselves produced over the years- I wonder if any are still floating about?

From what I can gather, post-2000 it was just run from a Windows PC. Which used to crash a LOT when they first started using the system, sometimes you could be getting several reboots an hour, and it would crash again before even getting to the end of the first video (which was always the same song after each reboot, from what I could tell they had a pre-programmed playlist that played after each reboot, or if there were no requests left in the queue... you quite quickly worked out what the first few songs on each week's pre-programmed playlist was because of how frequent crashes and the phone lines going down were). And you could tell when they switched to a backup system, as Ahe colour of the captions was different.

After a reboot, by following what selections were being made you could work out what was going to be played, and when (at least until it crashed again).

All the crashes leading to all the previous requests being erased in the 2000-01 era would have been a scandal only few years later when all the premium rate controversy happened, and all the Box channels dropped the request format around the same time that kicked off anyway. Though I did read somewhere that the last few years before then, it wasn't a true jukebox any more, they just looked at what was requested and formatted a playlist based around it.

[WillPS]

The Hits stuck with the request format almost to the end I think?

I remember on a few occasions after their first graphics refresh (about 18 months after they launched) the system would crash and they'd end up going back to the old graphics - presumably a completely separate Windows PC. The default graphics weren't massively different from the original set, but it was extremely noticeable when they were doing one of their themed weeks/weekends, as the colours would totally change.

I always wondered what happened about the requests that went in but knowing what we know now they were probably just totally lost whenever the system changed/restarted. There's no chance that sort of thing could be got away with post-phone in scandal.

The Box's current output reminds me a lot of the The Hits in Classic Hits mode actually.

Another memory I have of The Hits, possibly towards the end, was they would have scheduled 'takeovers' by Kerrang (Friday nights) and Kiss (Saturday nights). They weren't a simulcast of Kerrang or Kiss and they didn't have requests, but they did almost completely rebrand for these strands using the Kerrang/Kiss graphics.

[James2001]

I think the request format was dropped across all channels not long before the end of The Hits anyway, was one of the first things that happened when Channel 4 bought their share in the network.

[nwtv2003]

I see on The Box right now on the EPG it is listed as ‘The Box - Music TV you controlled!’ and currently has the 1992 logo as the DOG. Nice touch.

Sadly no NTSC resolution for full affect.

[WillPS]

I see on The Box right now on the EPG it is listed as ‘The Box - Music TV you controlled!’ and currently has the 1992 logo as the DOG. Nice touch.

Sadly no NTSC resolution for full affect.

It's a repetitive tribute 'programme' which has been running since June 1st, although other than the tweaked 'You Controlled' slide there's not really much difference to the rest of their output at the moment. The presentation also changed on the same day, although the DOG and transitions took a few more days to change (as always seems to happen annually when The Box rebranded to or from Boxmas).

The interesting (read: videos I've not seen for many years) stuff I'm catching is in the generic 'The Box: 1992-2024' slots which seem to fill the EPG.

[James2001]

When I just tuned in, they were showing a video properly pillarboxed rather than cropped to 16:9 for once as well.

[WillPS]

When I just tuned in, they were showing a video properly pillarboxed rather than cropped to 16:9 for once as well.

It's a mixture, I've seen a couple of 14:9 compromise ones as well. Like Challenge, I'd guess maybe it depends when the videos were added to their library. Perhaps the more recent additions aren't cropped?

[Division2023]

I see on The Box right now on the EPG it is listed as ‘The Box - Music TV you controlled!’ and currently has the 1992 logo as the DOG. Nice touch.

Sadly no NTSC resolution for full affect.

Anyone know when The Box upgraded to PAL?

[James2001]

People always suspected the poor picture quality was down to the NTSC>PAL conversion, though there were a couple of days in early 2000 where the picture quality was a lot higher than usual (but was still worse than other channels), but the captions loaded really slowly- like loading a picture on a slow dial-up internet connection, then when the picture quality went back to how it was before, the captions started appearing normally again. So that's always made me wonder if there was something else behind the lower picture quality, and outputting in a higher picture quality meant the system didn't run properly. After all, even the worst NTSC>PAL conversions you saw elsewhere on TV still didn't look as poor as The Box did (though I guess The Box being PAL>NTSC>PAL added an extra layer of degredation... and the US videos would have been already been through an NTSC>PAL conversion before The Box even got their hands on them and converted them to NTSC again)

It was around September 2000 they moved to the new system, at least on the Sky/national feed, the cable companies that still ran their own version still used the NTSC laserdisc based one, though there weren't many still left by then and didn't last much beyond that.

Our cable company (the former-Diamond Cable in Nottinghamshire) moved to the Sky version in September/October 1999, which was a major disapointment as it meant the end of being able to call for free. One thing the Sky version had that our local version didn't is that for some reason the beginning of videos were frequently cut off (sometimes only a couple of seconds, but could be as much as 30), which also meant the graphic with the selection number didn't appear in sync with the burn-in song title captions (and didn't appear at all at the end if too much of the start of the video was cut off).

[James2001]

Scraped together what very few bits of Box presentation I could find on my recordings. While I recorded a lot from The Box, I just recorded the songs I liked and not any of the presentation- something I've come to regret! So the bits I have ended up there by chance (or, in the case of a couple of them, recorded when I taped me doing some channel hopping). Someone unfortunate appears on the Breaking Out Of The Box sequence...

Also put in the extended opening and closing (the very beginning missing sadly, as I'd just press record when a song I liked came on) to the video for S Club Party which was only ever shown on The Box (and hasn't even been seen on there, or any of the Emap/Bauer/4Music channels since 2000)- was clearly filmed alongside the Back to the 50s special, but none of the extra footage appears in it (apart from the bit at the very start). Ends with Tina actually vocally namechecking The Box and their slogan, so clearly this extended intro and outro was made just for them!

One thing I remember from the Back to the 50s special itself was a scene in a bowling alley... where they made no attempt to cover up the modern AMF bowling equipment, or a Pepsi machine with what was at the time the brand new logo behind the counter... depsite supposedly being 1959.

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