Television: A Boost for Pay TV

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Pay television in the U.S. has never really paid. The sole system now operating in Hartford, Conn., has not begun to show a profit. But Reuben H. Donnelley Corp.,* publishers of classified telephone directories, and Lear-Siegler, Inc., electronics manufacturers, are confident that toll TV has a future.

The two companies filed a registration statement with the SEC last week outlining plans to issue some $27 million worth of public stock for a project to pipe pay TV to subscribers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Hopefully, they will be offering first-run movies, all the productions of Manhattan Impresario Sol Hurok, and the home games of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, now blacked out on local commercial TV.