Once you were at the main menu, you could start navigating through the different areas. When you started up the Genesis and cued up the SEGA Channel, the front-end menu system for the service was loaded into the adapter. The adapter itself was pretty much a blank slate. The SEGA Channel was a one-way street, sending a broadcast signal into the adapter in your Genesis. The Technology Even though the SEGA Channel was broadcast over coaxial cable, not entirely unlike a cable modem, the service was not like the Internet. The service officially ended on J- three years into the Saturn's lifecycle. But as the Genesis entered its sunset phase with the rise of the 32-bit generation and the SNES managing to finally take a permanent hold on the majority share of the 16-bit market, the SEGA Channel faded. At the height of the service, the SEGA Channel had over 250,000 subscribers. The game line-up included catalog titles from SEGA and other third-party publishers, but it also offered demos for upcoming games and, like the Virtual Console, access to games that were not released in America, such as Alien Soldier. The games were often rotated and shuffled every month, with some updates happening every other week. For a monthly fee (that depended on location, but was approximately $15) and a $25 activation fee that also provided the necessary hardware, Genesis owners received a SEGA Channel adapter that fit into the console's cartridge slot and access to upwards of 50 games. Instead of using the Internet (which was in its pop culture infancy in 1994), SEGA teamed with Time Warner Cable and TCI - both cable giants in the nineties - to deliver games over regular coaxial cable. The SEGA Channel, released nationally in North America in 1994, was an exceedingly innovative delivery system for games - quite prescient to what's happening now with services like Wii Ware, XBLA, and the PlayStation Network.
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