Tom Anthony Personal Blog

In December 1981 cable television programming was still pretty new. CNN was barely 18 months old and MTV had just debuted 7 months earlier in August. Previously the only revenue stream available for Cable Providers was the monthly fee for bringing premium movie services such as HBO or Showtime into the home. Now with the advent of cable-only programming the carriers had an opportunity to score with advertising dollars formerly reserved for the local television stations.

I was selling radio advertising at the time and the manager of the local cable company knew I was also a producer and announcer. That’s when I was recruited out of a radio job by Centel Cable Television of Florida to head their first local insertion advertising efforts. They put my office down at the technical center – also called the “Head End” so I could be close to the actual tape machines used to feed the network.

Each month I would get reels of promotional videos from the networks like Cinemax and HBO, add a voice over announcing local phone numbers for the cable company and schedule the spots to run on the first ever cable networks such as ESPN, CNN and MTV. Recently I was transferring my last bits of video from VHS to DVD and came across a reel of those spots. Here is a group of commercials for Cinemax, HBO, Schlitz Beer, and Florida based music retailer Specs.

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