[swozey]

I don't know how I convinced my parents to get me this in elementary but not a single other person I ever met had heard of it. I had no idea it had interesting tech, definitely didn't know it used satellites.

It was a really unreliable service, at least for me in Virginia. We had to call support all the time the short time I had it (1-3 months).

``` They would then send everything to a company called Foley Hi-Tech, who would create the game menu graphics/animations and insert all the monthly content. They ended up with a ~60MB file called a "game image", which was burnt to a CD and sent to a satellite uplink facility in Denver, Colorado. The CD would then be installed in the uplink game server computer, which would continuously transmit the game data in a loop over satellite. Cable headends all over the US would receive the satellite transmission and send it to cable subscribers. The data being sent in a continuous loop is how the service's "interactivity" was achieved at a time when cable TV providers could only transmit data to all subscribers and couldn't receive data (i.e. what game a given subscriber wants to download) ```

[SllX]

> I don't know how I convinced my parents to get me this in elementary but not a single other person I ever met had heard of it.

It was an interesting almost niche thing. My cousins had a unit and the service which I played all the time, but trying to describe it to other children at school years after the fact was difficult because nobody had ever heard of it. Honestly it was a toss-up if they even knew what a Genesis was at that point in life. I didn’t even know what a Sega Channel was called until I had finally found a solid description online with an accompanying picture at some point in high school.

[jbmny]

I vividly remember playing Genesis in my living room as a kid when my parents were having friends over from out of town. My dad and his friend came in after a couple beers and my dad explained what I was playing. His friend knew all about Genesis already: "We've got the Sega Channel. I play 50 games a year!" I remember being very fascinated until he started laughing, which to me signaled that he was pulling my leg. I spent the next 30 or so years thinking the "Sega Channel" was a dumb joke from an inebriated friend of my dad's. Until today.

Looking back, maybe my dad nudged him to change the subject so that I wouldn't spend the next month begging for a subscription.

[nerdix]

I knew of no one that had Sega Channel and I only knew of its existence because I had a subscription to Sega Power around the time of its launch which was covered in the magazine.

The article claims 250,000 subscribers at its peak but it might as well have been zero on my little world. It's interesting how a service could have a quarter million subscribers and you could have basically no proof that anyone used it at all. That would be unheard of today. If Sega Channel launched today. Those 250k subscribers would be posting on social media, creating dedicated subreddits, uploading review videos to YouTube and live streaming on twitch. Anyone with even a passing interest in it would encounter the content of its users. The internet has really made the world smaller.

[ndiddy]

Using satellites to transmit the game data wasn't TOO exotic, I imagine they did it because all the cable headends were already set up to receive national channels carried over satellite. Having centralized control of the game server also let them switch out the game images for timed events such as competitions. For regions outside the US, Sega went the simpler route of putting game servers at each headend and mailing out CDs each month.

It makes sense that it was unreliable in certain areas, cable TV was analog back then so cable providers didn't really have to worry about signal noise being a serious problem until Sega Channel came along.