Watch These Old West Michigan Television Sign-offs Before You Go To Bed
Here is a local tribute to an era in broadcasting that for the most part doesn't exist anymore. The late night television sign-off.
From the early days of television and radio, stations used to end their broadcasting day with some kind of short informational feature, a brief newscast, general station engineering and contact information or something similar. Then the broadcast day would end with the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, America The Beautiful or some other type of patriotic piece before going to static or a test pattern for the overnight hours.
With very few exceptions, stations now air some type of programming 24/7. They have filled late night schedules with either infomercials, home shopping shows, network news, movies, game shows or reruns of daytime programming. But it wasn't too long ago that you would see the following on your screen before it was time to hit the hay.
Do you remember any of these? (Apologies, as the quality of some of these videos are quite grainy)
WWMT-TV 3 (CBS) 1989 Sign-off
WOTV-41 (ABC) 1993 Sign-off
WXMI Fox-17 (FOX) 1989 Sign-off
WGVU-WGVK 35 & 52 (PBS) Sign-off 1993
If you happen to have some old television sign-offs on an old video or uploaded, we would love to see them even if they aren't from West Michigan. Leave a link or comment about it the Facebook comments.
We now conclude another web article. Good night and make sure you join us again tomorrow...
(These videos are credited to YouTube user capnvid42)