Hollywood

Example of Hollywood in action.

The TV Guide Channel software (internally named Hollywood) was used to power the TV Guide Channel following mid-2000 through late 2019. Like PC Prevue, this iteration ran off of Windows. The software began development in 1997 and was released in July of 1999 shipping with a tan guide, reminiscent of the firmware on various Motorola cable boxes, progressing through different visual schemes over the years.

Notices posted by various channels and cable companies indicate in 2019 that the network has discontinued the scrolling guide in all instances and no longer provides a data feed for the base distribution.

As of 2020, the Hollywood software has been recovered by various community members and is in the process of being recovered. An installation guide can be found here for Hollywood.

Hardware

Example of a Hollywood unit. These units were manufactured by Compaq.

The Hollywood units were initially manufactured by Compaq and based on the Compaq Professional Workstation SP700. These units vary from different specs of each individual machine. The following list is based upon speculation:

• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows XP Professional
• Pentium II 440MHz
• STB Systems STB 1X0-0751-407 (Tulsa) Video Card
• 262 MB RAM
• 9-34 GB SCSI HDD (formatted with a C partition for Windows and a D partition for Hollywood)
• 32X CD-ROM
• 3½-inch floppy drive (for playlists)

While some units were shipped with Windows NT, some speculation (and files on the D partition) might have indicated that later machines were shipped with or upgraded to Windows XP at some point.

STB Systems, Inc built a custom card for these units, which they referred to as the TULSA. The card was designed for real-time mixing of video and graphics in a broadcast-quality manner. The card's functionality included an MPEG-2 decoder, composite video encoder/decoder, video genlock decoder, two graphics accelerator ICs, an 8-bit alpha video mixer, and audio pass-thru. Since this card is important for Hollywood to run in hardware mode, as of February 2024, nobody has been able to get it to work under a virtual machine without installing the Software-Only distribution provided with the most-recent installer.

Software

Hollywood was distributed in a few different distributions:

• TV Guide Channel - the base distribution.
• ScreenTV - meant to coincide with a short-lived rebrand of Sneak Prevue with the same name.
• Software-Only (SWO) - a barebones distribution (similar to that of PC Prevue) that lacked support for the proprietary TULSA card and received listings over the internet rather than via satellite.

The Hollywood software was initially built with the proprietary TULSA card in mind, particularly for smooth scrolling and video mixing. As a result, the base distribution requires the card to be present to function at all. The only way to get it functioning without the card is to install the Software-Only distribution, which omitted hardware scrolling and replaced video mixing with a promotional display at the top half of the screen.

Data was handled in a similar way to previous iterations of the software, receiving data over satellite, The only exception was the Software-Only distribution, which received its listings over an FTP server. Data for listings, the guide's theme, and weather conditions were stored in several databases powered by Microsoft SQL Server. Although the data stream for the base distribution was reported to have been turned off in July 2019, the Software-Only distribution seems to still have up-to-date listings generated for it.

For an archive of available Hollywood installers, see Hollywood installers.

External Links

Hollywood example

Wyantotte Cable retires scrolling guide listings

SKT Cable: Pop discontinues Hollywood units and scrolling listings