Television: Payday, Some Day

When Samuel Goldwyn first pondered the possibilities of pay television, he saw it as the embodiment of progress —"and nobody yet," he exclaimed, "has shown the way to stop progress." Goldwyn was clearly uninformed about the procrastinating ways and restricted means of the Federal Communications Commission. In fact, the FCC dallied until this month, some 17 years later, before authorizing the U.S.'s first nationwide and permanent pay-TV service. And by now, with the networks having cornered most of the programming properties, the success of "fee-vee" is hardly assured.

As conceived by its originators in the early 1950s, pay TV was to bring to every living room Broadway musicals, operas from the Met, heavyweight-title fights—all for $1 or so a show. There would be ballet, first-run and art movies never seen on TV, classical drama and the boldest of the off-Broadway experiments—the sort of minority programming that network executives claim is uneconomical. But that vision did not reckon with the relentless opposition of movie exhibitors and the broadcasting lobbies in Washington. Over the years the TV industry kept insisting, as the National Association of Broadcasters' chief counsel put it, that pay TV "would convert a free highway into a toll road. It would require the public to pay for what they now view for free."

Tab-in-the-Box. Cowed by such a campaign, the FCC felt that all it could do was authorize a few experimental fee-vee operations. And none was on a large enough scale to test either the hopes or the fears of the contending interests. A pilot system was franchised in Denver but never got on the air. A Bartlesville, Okla., project lasted nine months. Other projects were quickly aborted in New York City and Chicago. Fee-vee's most promising and disheartening trial came in Los Angeles. Just as the operation seemed to be catching on, the broadcasters and film exhibitors forced a repeal referendum onto the 1964 California ballot. Then, with a war chest of reportedly $2,000,000, they mounted an ad campaign that convinced the voters to vote no. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the referendum illegal, but by then the California fee-vee company had gone bankrupt.

Today, only one pay system remains alive—but not well—in Hartford, Conn. When the viewer tunes in at night to station WHCT, the image on the screen looks like a shattered mirror, and the audio twitters like a rewinding tape recorder. Subscribers interested in the show dial a code number on an un scrambling device perched atop their set. Automatically, the picture and sound come in clear and loud, and a tape inside the decoding box totes up a charge of 50¢ to $1.50 a show. Every month, the tape is pulled out of the box as a statement. There is also a service charge of $3.25 a month.