UPI Newstime was a cable television network founded by United Press International in 1978, and premiered on July 3 of that year.
UPI Newstime was unique in how it distributed its programming to local cable TV (CATV) headends via satellite, using a form of slow-scan television, or SSTV technology.
It consisted of black & white still images & alphanumeric texts displayed in a slideshow fashion with each new slide building from the left to right of the screen, each taking 8.5 seconds to be shown on the air.
The programming was produced initially by Newstime's studios in regular NTSC video format, with each 15-minute newscast being edited and mastered to U-Matic-format 3/4" videotape.
[4] Shortly after EBS took over UPI Newstime in 1981, they merged the channel with another similar SSTV-transmitted cable TV network founded by Southern Satellite Systems (the corporate parent of Satellite Syndicated Systems, the uplink provider for UPI Newstime as mentioned earlier), called The Women's Channel.