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¶ Basic cable. For a one-time fee averaging $15, the cable company that has the franchise for the subscriber's area will run a wire from the nearest telephone pole into the house and attach it to the back of the TV set, much as the Bell System installs a new phone. For a monthly fee averaging $7, the viewer can watch up to 36 channels, vs. a maximum of twelve on a set wired to a rooftop antenna. The cable brings in sharp, clear pictures and often enables a viewer to pick up out-of-the-area stations that may show on, say, Wednesday night a movie he missed on the local outlets on Tuesday.
The basic-cable viewer can also tune in a clutch of UHF channels featuring the offerings of stations whose signals are too weak to be picked up ordinarily by antenna. These programs make up a bewildering smorgasbord: sports events (Madison Square Garden, for example, offers to basic cable many basketball and hockey games and boxing matches not shown on broadcast TV), educational, and religious shows. All channels viewable on basic cable can carry advertising.
Another source of programming for basic cable is the superstations—independent broadcast-TV stations that also lease space on Satcom, whose signals bounce to the earth stations of cable systems all over the country. At present there are four: WTCG in Atlanta, WOR in New York, WON in Chicago and KTVU in the San Francisco-Oakland area. They and their cable customers should benefit especially from the FCC'S proposal last week that cable operators be permitted to pick up as many signals as they like from anywhere, and a companion proposal that cable companies be permitted to air shows even if the same programs are being carried by local broadcasters.
The superstations' offerings to cable now consist largely of sports events and reruns of once popular network shows. But Ted Turner, the flamboyant yachtsman and owner of WTCG, promised last week to introduce some more appealing programs: original children's shows, reruns of highly rated public-broadcasting programs (e.g., The Ascent of Man) that may not have been seen in some areas that cable now reaches. Superstations, however, are running into furious opposition from conventional broadcasters and their allies in the sports and entertainment worlds. MCA-Universal and Paramount are balking at selling any of their TV shows to Turner's Atlanta station, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are threatening to withdraw broadcast rights from KTTV if that Los Angeles station also goes on the satellite.
¶ Pay cable. For an additional $8 to $10 a month, a subscriber gets a decoder box. It unscrambles pictures transmitted over a special channel by a for-cable-only programming company that sells its service to the local cable operator. Main offerings: recent movies, some of the quality of Annie Hall, The Turning Point and The Goodbye Girl, often shown just after they have finished running in local theaters; sports events (e.g., a U.S.-Soviet track meet not carried on regular TV or even basic cable); and entertainment specials, often Las Vegas-type revues built around a single star such as Barry Manilow, Steve Martin or Crystal Gayle.