Captain Courageous, Into the Sunset

Most of you remember Ted Turner as the founder of CNN. Some of you know he created the “Superstation,” TBS.

Before that, TBS was an Atlanta UHF broadcast station, Channel 17. Tomorrow, it returns to its roots, though now digitally.

Turner took over his father’s billboard company in the Sixties. In 1970 he bought Channel 17 in Atlanta. He bought the Atlanta Braves and Hawks in 1976 and aired them on the station.

“The Braves were flying back to Atlanta during the 1976 season when Turner, the team's rookie owner and cable TV pioneer, began diagramming.

'Ted was trying to show us how it could work —- how the signal could be sent from Atlanta to a satellite and then be beamed to cable systems all over the country,' longtime Braves broadcaster Pete Van Wieren recalled. ‘We went, That's interesting,' but it was such a remote concept.'"

At the time, there was no ESPN, no Fox, no regional sports networks, no weeknight baseball on TV in most of the country, even in markets near major league teams. No local station had dared to go national, let alone one as obscure as Turner's WTCG (later renamed TBS).” From today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Then there was CNN, TNT, TCM and a few others. Then the inglorious years of Time Warner, then AOL/Time Warner, then again, Time Warner.

Ted invented, if not technically, practically, cable and satellite TV.

The last game of this years Braves season was this afternoon. It was broadcast on TBS to a national audience. The Braves lost.

Starting tomorrow Channel 17 is just a local station for the first time in over thirty years. What was WTCG, then TBS, is now WPCH, "Peachtree TV." If you live around here, you can get it as a broadcast channel or on cable or satellite. TBS lives on, but now it’s just another cable and satellite channel. It will carry the MLB playoffs. Next year Peachtree TV will carry half of the Braves games with others carried by FSN, both locally. TBS will air “Sunday Afternoon” baseball games which may or may not include a Braves game.

No more will I be able to get up in a hotel room on a Sunday morning in California, get the LA Times, coffee and a bagel in the lobby and go back into the room to read the paper and tune into the Braves game at 10:05 a.m. (PST). (For better or worse, Ted invented TV not starting shows on the hour or half-hour too.)

Thanks for thirty years of the Braves Ted, and that other stuff.