The Future: FeeVee
Pay TV will get a thorough test in the U.S.--and soon. The fact seemed inevitable last week, as another "free" but dismal TV season was running out, and more and more plans were firming up for what the phrasemakers in the trade are beginning to call FeeVee. Items:
P: Heartened by reports from the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, where International Telemeter Corp. is trying toll television (TIME, March 14) in competition with three regular channels from Buffalo and two from Toronto, Chicago's Zenith Radio Corp., in association with RKO General, is asking the FCC for permission to make a similar test in Hartford.
P: Oklahoma Entrepreneur Henry Griffing, who rushed wired FeeVee to Bartlesville three years ago, and failed, is ready to try again--this time with a network spread over three dozen towns in the Southwest.
P: West Coast baseball teams, which have blacked out local broadcasts of home games, are anxiously awaiting a crack at pay TV.
P: Telemeter (a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures) is already planning another test, this time in the suburbs of Manhattan, and is preparing such packages as Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium on both film and tape. In charge: newly appointed Executive Producer Jean Dalrymple, Broadway veteran and director of the theater wing of New York's City Center.
Future Problems. Toll TV's opponents, who tried to convince the FCC that even a test of pay TV must be avoided at all costs, could do little about Etobicoke. The Canadian town is not only outside FCC jurisdiction, but the Telemeter closed-circuit system uses leased cables, not the public air waves. Affirmative results are piling up. Of 13,000 homes that are potential FeeVee customers, close to 4,000 have subscribed (initial fee: $5). New installations of the coin boxes--they fit any standard TV set--are going on at the rate of 100 a day. With a choice of three pay channels, stay-at-home patrons are happily shelling out for first-run movies (a sampling: A Summer Place, The Gazebo, Sink the Bismarck) at the rate of $1 for a two-hour show every evening for the family (the cost of one ticket to a downtown movie). Children can chip in nickels and dimes toward the cost of their favorite shows, buy the likes of Tom Thumb and Gulliver's Travels for a quarter on Sunday afternoons. Father is staying home for sports events he cannot tune in free, and during the day Telemeter broadcasts music free.
"We're delighted," says one Canadian telemeter user, H. W. Wilcox. "We used to go to the movies about twice a year. Now we go twice a week and have all the comforts of home." Rare is the Etobicoke citizen who disagrees. Yet, despite the obvious novelty of the electronic gimmick, local moviehouses so far report no drop in attendance. And no one yet has reported a wayward child's spending too much money for shows the family cannot afford--a favorite prediction of pay TV opponents.
There are problems ahead, admits Eugene Fitzgibbons, Telemeter's Canadian boss. The cost of collecting the cash from coin boxes in subscribers' homes is still uncertain; the reliability of the coin boxes themselves is still unproven. No one is yet sure of the public's long-run taste in home movies or sports shows, nor can anyone be certain how business will fall off when families move out of town for the summer.
Dismal Prediction. U.S. experiments face similar uncertainties. The Hartford test, for example, will transmit its pictures over the air rather than by cable, requiring a complicated unscrambling device in each home. Instead of Telemeter's pay-as-you-see plan, there may be a charge account for home entertainment, a tempting feature that could cause trouble. Above all, will programs freed from sponsor and ad-agency control be better than the offerings of sponsor-supported networks? NBC President Robert Sarnoff argues that they will not, that pay TV will have to track down the mass audience just as the commercial networks do now, and in the end the home-bought product will be indistinguishable from the networks' present offering.
Not so, counter pay-TV partisans: the toll system will allow quality shows to find their own markets, should be able to cover for its paying armchair audiences many topnotch attractions that have been inaccessible to TV so far--opera at the Met, Broadway shows, first-run movies. Sarnoff's dismal prediction, say pay TV's supporters, merely represents a part of the networks' long lobbying against pay TV. Pay proponents have complained to the FCC that the networks have editorialized against them on the air, formulated a phony "grass roots" campaign to impress Congressmen, taunted kids with the prediction that Rin Tin Tin would disappear if pay TV were authorized.
But even as they are fighting, the networks are facing up to the probability that they will lose. In a statement implying that pay TV would corrupt the public interest for selfish purposes, CBS President Frank Stanton has nevertheless assured stockholders that if the worst happened, CBS is prepared to take the pay way too. And the trade nurtures the rumor that NBC has a toll system in the works. "If the pay system develops," said President Sarnoff early this year, "free television, as we know it, would face disintegration, and we would have no alternative but to join the coin collectors of the future."
Sneaking In. Speaking for the "coin collectors," Telemeter's West Coast spokesman, Paul MacNamara, is only too happy to agree. "If the networks want to survive," says he, "they're going t<