Lucky 7 (pirate TV station)
Lucky 7 was a pirate television station, believed to be the first ever to operate in the United States, that aired for three nights in the spring of 1978 in Syracuse, New York.
| Syracuse, New York | |
|---|---|
| Branding | Lucky 7 |
| Channels | Analog: 7 (VHF) |
| Founded | 1978 |
Operation
Lucky 7 (operated by the "Renegade Broadcasting Company") aired for a total of 25 hours[1] during the evenings of April 14–16, 1978 (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) on VHF channel 7, an otherwise-unoccupied frequency in the Syracuse area.
Programs aired by Lucky 7 included episodes of such TV series as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, as well as several films unavailable on broadcast television at the time. These included Oscar-winners Rocky and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, plus pornographic fare such as the infamous Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. (Deep Throat, making its TV debut, was on two reels of 2” film; an unknown person told jokes while the second one was being loaded.) According to a New York Times report, a man with a gas mask and a noose around his neck was seen on-screen occasionally, editorializing and claiming that half the TVs in the Syracuse area were able to see the broadcasts. Station identification featured a pair of dice rolled to seven, backed by female singers (reportedly from SU's Crouse Music School).[2]
Lucky 7 made national news, with the real Syracuse TV stations featuring bits of the pirate broadcasts on their own news shows.
Aftermath
The identity of the pirates remains obscure to this day. At the time, an Federal Communications Commission engineer theorized that the broadcasters tapped into Home Box Office and other networks to acquire the programming, and that the transmissions probably originated from the Syracuse University area, since Lucky 7 came in strongest near the campus. Speculation in subsequent years indicate that Lucky 7 was the brainchild of some SU communications students (allegedly from the Newhouse School of Communications) who used some equipment, normally used for closed circuit broadcasts on Channel 7 on the University's cable system, and managed to amplify the signal using a VHF antenna.[3] Officially, the culprits were never found, but some rumors indicate that the pirates actually were captured by the FCC fairly rapidly, but no charges were ever pursued.