Pay-As-You-See

It's a mean man who won't promise; and there has been nothing mean about the sponsors of television. Television has loitered "just around the corner" for so long, says President Eugene F. McDonald Jr. of the Zenith Radio Corp., because it is trapped in a "vicious triangle."

The triangle: "Advertisers won't sponsor television programs without a mass audience. We can't get mass audiences until the American people are given . . . pleasing . . . entertainment. And ... no private companies are big enough to finance it." (One topflight show, McDonald estimates, would cost almost $10 million a year.)

Last week McDonald believed that he had solved the troublesome triangle with a simple formula: pay-as-you-see. His company's scientists, he said, had perfected a method of peeling several key frequencies off the television band, channeling them through telephone wires. Without these essential frequencies, the telecast is received as a meaningless blur.

To clear up the blur, the owner of a pay-as-you-see television set would only have to call "Phone Vision" on his telephone, tell the operator what show he wanted to see; the price of admission would be added to his phone or electric light bill. A small, inexpensive (about $5) telephone attachment* would transmit the missing key frequencies to his set. Another show could not be tuned in without another paid admission. The system, McDonald predicts, will be operating within a year--barring, of course, legal objections by the Federal Communications Commission, which has not yet considered the matter.

* Not to be confused with a system demonstrated by the Russians last week, which allows telephone talkers to see each other on a small phone-side television screen.

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