[James2001]

So it had local variations on cable when it launched?

Yep, that's how it was run for the first few years. I know The Box used to run during the downtime of Granada Plus for a while, pre-Sky Digital,, though not sure whether they relayed a cable company's or it was a version run just for that. The single national version launched with Sky Digital, and all the local cable versions slowly switched to that over the course of a couple of years. I'm not sure when the last one closed down, but ours did in the autumn of 1999. When I used to use the forums on The Box's website, I gathered there was at least one local version still running (from the laserdisc system) in late 2000 (even after the national version had switched to the new system), but probably didn't last long after that.

Worth remembering in the 80s and early 90s it was quite common for cable channels to be locally run, the likes of Bravo for example were run through tapes sent out to the cable companies who played them. I think HVC was still doing that into the early 00s.

[James2001]

It did mean that there must've been a dozen-or-so bits of The Box laserdisc video jukebox equipment in the UK at one point tho!

Yet we don't seem to have seen any photos or videos of it, which is a shame.

Those videos that were posted a few days back that were clearly raw Box copies (with the burned in titles), would be interesting to know if they're from master tapes, or transfers from the laserdiscs themselves. If the latter, then is confirms something I've long suspected (due to a few days in early 2000 when the picture quality shot up, but the rest of the system slowed down) that the poor picture quality wasn't from the laserdiscs themselves, but somewhere later in the chain.

From what I've been told, the later system was just a Windows 2000 PC playing DV files which seems... very uninteresting in comparison, but likely explains why it crashed and needed to be rebooted so often. I guess seeing the behind the hood workings of the software would be interesting at least.

[WillPS]

I thought the Laserdiscs were NTSC, and the lousy image was due to a crap on-the-fly NTSC->PAL conversion on the output? Do these videos disprove that?

It's much easier to do a decent standards conversion job if you don't need to do it in realtime, so even for PAL videos converted to NTSC laserdisc you'd expect the image at that point to be reasonable (when viewed on NTSC compliant equipment!).

[gottago]

The big screens in London's Spitalfields Market, which up until last week was either playing Kiss or Magic, has had to resort to That's 80s!

[James2001]

That's a hell of a downgrade..

[Tola]

youtu.be 

There's this example on how the original laserdisc system worked for The Box in its earlier years; or at least a replica of how it happened (whilst the disc was changed the selection menu would be shown)

[WillPS]

It'd be really interesting to find out how closely the equipment cable companies had resembled those machines. I presume the discs weren't glass mastered discs but rather a recoded/burned variant - CRVs or perhaps more likely RLV. Seems pretty wasteful only having one <5 min video per disc too, each one could have fit an entire week's releases and Laserdiscs were perfectly capable of playing from/to a specific frame, but if they were queued in the same fashion as the Laserjuke above then that would have been necessary.

Any 90s cable company broadcast engineers reading who can shed any light?

[James2001]

youtu.be 
There's this example on how the original laserdisc system worked for The Box in its earlier years; or at least a replica of how it happened (whilst the disc was changed the selection menu would be shown)

I remember those things, there used to be one in Skegness Butlins food hall in the mid-90s, and there was one in our hotel when we went to Spain in 1999 (though it hadn't been updated since 1997, I assume that's when the support was dropped).

How similar The Box's equipment was to that though, we don't know.

[WillPS]

I've gone on a Google rampage looking for info. Closest I've found is on a forum dedicated to the analogue EPG 'Prevue', which includes an article with information about the Lifestyle Satellite Jukebox service, which of course significantly predates The Box:
www.ariweinstein.com 

Untitled

  Source: www.ariweinstein.com

There's some suggestion in the thread that The Box came out of an Amiga, which would make a lot of sense.

[James2001]

Amigas ran everything in the late 80s and early 90s it feels like! We all know about The Chart Show using them for the info graphics during songs, complete with mouse arrow!

I remember years ago talking with someone, I think on Digitalspy, saying they had a laserdisc from the old Lifestyle Satellite Jukebox.