The New Emperor of Pay

Pat Weaver, once the president of NBC, is now the emperor of Subscription Television. His empire is scarcely two weeks old and so far has only 2,400 viewers in a small swatch of West Los Angeles. But the clamor it has raised is at the fightin'-words level all over California.

Weaver's STV gets into people's homes on telephone lines. It gets into their ordinary TV sets through an adapter, which puts STV programs onto Channel 6 -- a deadhead channel in Los Angeles. By twisting a knob on a Program Selector Box that sits atop their TV sets, subscribers can choose among Weaver's "Channels" A, B and C, each of which has its own programs. One typical evening early this "week, subscribers could choose from among a tape of the New York Phoenix Theater's production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths ($2), a concert by Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra ($1.50), and Vittorio De Sica's 1952 movie, Pardon My Trunk ($1).

Bills arrive at the end of the month. Viewers who let their sets run on as freely as of yore will be paying a pretty penny. But at least they have some "free sample viewing time" at the start of each program--a grace period of up to twelve minutes in which to decide whether a show seems worth paying for. A computer at STV headquarters receives impulses from subscribers' sets and tots up the tab.

Better Ball. Last week viewers had a go at Tyrone Guthrie's production of Oedipus Rex ($1.50), a lecture by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. on "The World We Want--and How to Get It" ($1), the South African play Sponono, by Alan Paton and Krishna Shah ($1.50), a flying lesson ($1), an ample sampling of revue material from Manhattan's Upstairs at the Downstairs ($1.50), and the British National Theater's production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, with Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Michael Redgrave, Dame Sybil Thorndike, and Rosemary Harris ($2.00).

Reaction in Los Angeles papers and among subscribers has been, on the whole, favorable. Baseball, which was not available last week since the Dodgers were out of town, proved to be particularly popular the week before, STV's first in operation. Ball games come over in color that is superior to the commercial variety, and viewers feel that at last they can really follow the ball. Next month Weaver will begin operations in San Francisco, and by next spring he hopes to reach his goal of 70,000 subscribers, which he figures he needs in order to break even. He already has 16,000 additional applicants from Los Angeles waiting to be hooked up. A handicap has been his failure to provide the first-run movies he had promised subscribers, because most movie exhibitors have looked on his STV as potential competition. But United Artists has just come round, selling him eight pictures, including Irma La Douce and Dr. No.

Soiled Naturals. Earlier pay TV experiments in Toronto and Hartford, Conn., have been inconclusive. RKO General's Phonevision has 5,000 subscribers presently watching movies in Hartford, and the company cannot decide whether to expand or give up. International Telemeter, which has 2,500 subscribers in a Toronto suburb, has been encouraged enough to announce that it is granting franchises for new pay TV systems in Dallas, Atlanta, Houston and Miami, to start operation next year.

Some people, who otherwise believe strongly in the future of pay TV, are doubtful about Weaver's venture because they think that he may be starting too fast, promising an aggregate of twelve hours of programming a day on his three "channels." He also needs votes. The sworn foes of subscription TV are so active in California that they have succeeded in placing an initiative on the November ballot, through which voters may vote pay TV out of existence by effecting the repeal of the act that originally sanctioned the subscription project. The foes are chiefly admen, theater operators, owners of commercial TV stations and other subjective warriors, who make the argument that subscription TV may prove to be a Pandora's box. Subscription TV could conceivably choke off free TV, they argue, then later--with mounting costs--start slipping ads in to help pay the bills, with the result that in a few years the nation would be paying to watch TV shows that are as loaded with commercials as they are now.

That is an interesting argument, but it has plot trouble. The sort of people who are going to support pay TV are precisely not the devotees of commercial TV. Pay TV appeal is necessarily to a minority audience, who want and will pay for high-quality but commercially low-rating material like full-scale opera and theater.

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