Granada's TV Rental Stuff

[Neil Jones]

It only had 4 push-button channels on it though, which meant when Channel 4 came along, we had to watch that through the video.

My grandad had a Baird TV with only 4 preset buttons, I think we tuned it into Channel 4 for him but I doubt he ever watched it and never had a video. 

Very unusual and not very useful in the 80s. But mind you the next step was putting too many presets, I remember seeing sets in the 90s and 2000s still boasting '100 channel memory' when there's no way in the UK that they would ever be used even if connected to cable

But there was various other things that outputted in a way that a TV saw as another channel. Such as old school games consoles and VCRs. The TV just saw them as another broadcast channel, and VCRs were by default usually on UHF Channel 37, which was where Channel 5 launched (for the most part) and the whole returning thing they had to do to launch.

But even then most people only needed no more than about seven at the most, and once VCRs adopted SCART connections they didn't need a UHF output at all for that, and by that point consoles were beginning to use other outputs like S-Video and HDMI.