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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."