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:
¶ 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.
¶ 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.
¶ West Coast baseball teams, which have blacked out local broadcasts of home games, are anxiously awaiting a crack at pay TV.
¶ 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.