Sounds like a way better method than watching the scrambled pay TV channels when they arrived in the 1980s, trying to catch sight of body parts. :haha:

A couple of Toronto channels showed soft-core or at least some skin on occasion. City-TV had it's "baby blue movies" night in the early 70s but I was just a wee lad. What became Omni was CFMT and late nights they'd broadcast European and Latino films that often showed nudity. Nothing gratuitous that I recall, but enough to make it worth staying up late. :tup:

My parents got me an Atari maybe a year or so before Nintendo hit it big in Canada. So for years while my friends had Nintendos, I had to make do with my clunky old Atari since my parents thought it would be a shame to just relegate it to the closet along with all the games since it was still so new to us.

I have to admit though, there was something to the sheer simplicity of those Atari games. My kid plays video games on a PS5 and I find the controls to be overwhelming at times :haha:

I remember going over to the homes of friends with dishes and marvelling at the incredible number of channels they had while I had to make do with my lousy dozen. Even wrestling pay per views were there for free... it was incredible.

Although I guess the modern equivalent is having an Android TV box and illegal streaming sites, no dish required.

I watched the scrambled PPV channels as well. Nothing more thrilling than seeing a random boob through all of the static fuzz.

Funny enough I was jealous of friends with cable because we only got obscure channels that none of my friends knew about. They would always talk about shows on X channel and I didn't get them.

I guess it doesn't matter since you have cable TV included with your rent, but the broadcaster apps (CTV, Global, CBC) have tons of content on them. If you ever have cable for just one show, it might be worth checking to see if one of the broadcasters carries the show on their app.

My grandparents certainly enjoyed cable when they visited us. We had TSN, which had Blue Jays games and curling matches that they missed out on at home.

My other grandparents, who had the C-band dish, got American channels I'd never heard of, such as Turner Classic Movies (which back then was not carried on Canadian cable). My late grandfather was a huge movie buff and that's why they had the dish.

Yeah we got tons of American channels. I remember The Box and Fox before it was available on cable.

Yep, we had all three.

In the many hours I spent watching scrambled PPV channels, I myself was always on the lookout for the fuzz that constituted a woman's p*s*y. :naughty:

Sony - which owns Jeopardy as well as Wheel of Fortune - has been notoriously opposed to entering the 21st century and providing its syndicated game shows to any streaming platforms. The rights to both shows in Canada is owned by a group of independent stations, none of which stream their channels online (aside from locally produced shows). They do broadcast over-the-air in their local communities, but in my case the station that has it is CHEK in Victoria, which doesn’t reach where I live.

In the United States, the only legal way to stream those two game shows is if you have a local station that carries the show and streams full-time online. All of the streams I’m aware of that do this are geo-blocked in Canada.

I’ve definitely looked into non-cable options for Jeopardy. This question frequently comes up on the Jeopardy subreddit.

Interesting... I had no idea it was so tough to find Jeopardy online.

Exceptionally difficult. Jeopardy gets really good ratings on Canadian TV (600K+, usually), but obviously the demo breakdown is heavily skewed older. Very difficult, if not impossible, to find legal Jeopardy streams.

Nope I remember Tales Of the Wizard Oz, but those/that triangled stick figured witch was before that in my timeline recollection..Underdog, and the witch are as far back as I can barely remember.

Heck, even this old ministry of Transportation Ontario commercial came after.
This one I remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9wHORHy2Gw

There was another show that we used to watch on Saturday mornings, and it was only after the cartoons were over..It was in the "B" list.
It took me years to try to figure it out, but I think it was on CFTO , and was hosted by that Toronto TV personality David Devall (I think).
The opening theme song was the Beatles - "All you need is love", and it was an adoption show called Family Finders, where they tried to find homes for children in need of adoption.
He paraded kids in front of the cameras focusing on one or a set at a time and you had to call in..He often said "and this one goes with him/her", and this one goes with (repeat), meaning that they were siblings.
Times sure were different!.

You and I are on the same page.

My Dad and Stepmom's place - where I spent part of the time - is outside the City (Springbank), which at the time was quite remote and you couldn't get cable if you were willing to pay. So we also had one of the massive satellite dishes, and they had pirated boards which became increasingly harder to use over time. At one point you had to manually enter codes for individual channels on satellites that would only work for a day or two.

But, the channels you didn't have access to often had a video feed with no audio, including the adult ones. This was most definitely not an issue for me! I quickly learned what satellites had them and made sure to put it back to the original settings afterwards.

Toronto in 1990
• Video Link

How is this from 1990, because Scotia Plaza was built in 1988 and is not in the skyline footage shots?

unless it's just an agglomeration of stock footage from the 1980s lol

Ah yes I forgot about those codes! And yes the in between channels were without audio but I didn’t care.

Hey, remember the days of this forum before 3 members held us all hostage to their never ending rants and gaslighting defending racism?