A.P. at Home

The wire service Teletype machine, so familiar a fixture in the newsroom, may soon invade the American home. Bulletins, weather reports, stock quotations, feature stories--all the 24-hours-a-day stream of news is being made available for community antenna television systems by Telemation, Inc., a small Salt Lake City electronics firm.

Copy will come in to Telemation's machine at the usual A.P. rate of 60 words per minute. It can also be rolled past the TV camera at a faster reading speed of 180 words per minute. With or without background music, the new news channel, its promoters contend, is ideally suited for the C.A.T.V. installations which service areas outside the range of the nearest TV transmitter. To get into the news business, the C.A.T.V. systems only have to plug in Telemation's black box, containing an A.P. Teletype and a TV camera.

Under its agreement with Telemation, A.P. will install the machines and maintain them. To date, A.P. has signed up some 30 C.A.T.V. systems. Whether people will continue to watch, once the novelty has worn off, is a matter of speculation. "C.A.T.V. systems are already using channels for nothing but weather reports," says Fred Strozier, A.P. broadcast-membership executive. "If people will sit and look at a silent weather channel, they will certainly look at a news channel."

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