If pay television ever takes hold, the letters ABC, NBC and CBS may seem about as dated as OWI, CCC and SPQR.
Last week the nation's first full-scale experiment in pay TV got under way over station WHCT in Hartford, Conn. Fee-vee is potentially television at its best. In theory, the viewer pays a nominal sum for first-run movies, live Broadway plays, sports events, opera, ballet—all uninterrupted by commercials.
Because of an eleventh-hour scramble, last week's opening splash in Hartford went somewhat kerplunk. First program was the movie version of Sunrise at Campobello (viewing price: $1), which has already made the rounds of the country's movie theaters and is well along on its journey from Broadway's Palace to The Late Show. Other first-week films include One-Eyed Jacks, Splendor in the Grass and Breakfast at Tiffany's. But programming should improve. Hartford's pay viewers will get a chance to see Warner Brothers' still unreleased The Music Man; and next autumn they will watch the Bolshoi Ballet.
WHCT, which is owned and operated by RKO General, has 200 subscribers for its pay programs and hopes to expand to 5,000 in 1963. Each pays $10 to have a Decoder attached to his set. The pay programs are broadcast in scrambled signals, and the Decoder, which looks like a table radio, straightens them out. The subscribers pay 75¢ a week as a basic rental fee, plus an average of $1.25 for the programs they select. Costs are recorded on a tape in the Decoder. The viewer rips it off like a grocery bill and sends it in with his check.
WHCT plans to broadcast between 20 and 40 hours of pay programs each week, and the experiment will be closely watched by interested broadcasters and hopeful viewers all over the U.S. There is even something interesting for nonsubscribers in Hartford. If they happen to turn on the channel, they see an attractively patterned, cubist tessellation of arms, torsos, scattered heads and errant thighs. It might well have been borrowed from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.