To provide Sega Channel, a cable company would need to install new equipment into their headend, integrate service authorization into their sales center, and purchase the game adapters. Game adapters were manufactured by Scientific Atlanta and General Instruments, with a cost to the cable operators of approximately $100 per unit. Additionally, many cable operators had to clean their broadcast signal in the head-end and all the way to "the pole" to ensure that the signal could be received. Sega, a gaming company, thus played a major role in improving infrastructure for future digital cable services, as well as broadband Internet access and digital telephone services. At its peak, Sega Channel was available to one-third of the United States and had 250,000 subscribers.
Sega Channel was not a video-on-demand service per se; rather, as the service's name would suggest, it actually was a broadcast channel, similar to premium broadcast channels which (at the time) required a separate piece of addressable cable converter equipment to access. The program code for the on-screen menus and the 50 available monthly games was continuously broadcast as a sort-of "sequential access" RF signal. The menu system would be loaded into memory on power-up (which took about 30 seconds), and when a game was selected, the machine would "wait" for the requisite program code to be broadcast, then download it into volatile RAM. A downloaded game could not be garnered -- upon resetting or powering off the console, it was erased from memory, and the user was required to download it again, if desired. (The menu system would have to be re-loaded into memory also.)
This method of accessing program content was very ahead of its time, and had only been tried once before, with Mattel's Intellivision platform. With all the electromagnetic "noise" inherent in older RG-59 coaxial cabling, downloading games could be problematic at times -- such noise could and did disrupt transmission of binary images 4-32 megabits in size (as well as the menu system). If this were to happen, the download would fail, in which case the user would be required to reset the console and try again.
