Sunday, November 07, 2021
From an extremely different era 16
Last week I was discussing subscription vs advertising models wrt Substack.
Looking for 1957 Sputnik-related stuff in old radio journals, I bumped into a very early example of the subscription vs advertising distinction in TV. The location caught my attention more strongly than the subject. New tech developments don't usually start in Oklahoma. TeleMovies in Bartlesville was sending first-run movies directly to TV sets via coax cable. No translator box was needed because the signal was sent on an unused TV channel. Broadcasters and politicians were watching closely, because this could change the business and regulatory world in a big way.
The most important thing in this article is what WASN'T important.
The eyes of the entertainment and media worlds are on the high-income city of Bartlesville, in northeastern Oklahoma, but hardly anyone in the city is aware that there is anything historic or unusual about the paid living-room movies that go into 545 homes.Note high-income. Bartlesville and Ponca were RICH towns before Share Value and offshoring. Now they're poor. Incidentally, Bartlesville was close enough to Tulsa that it didn't need 'community antenna TV'. All three Tulsa channels came in clearly. This service was solely for movies.
The 545 homes hooked up Nov. 1 will produce a box office take of $5,000 in November, plus any income from new subscribers joining early in the month, provided they all pay their $9.79 monthly bills. After two months Vumore is getting ready to do its first hard-selling of TeleMovies. Thus far the promotion has been designed to let Bartlesville and the nation know that TM was in operation. Now Vumore is getting ready for door-to-door selling and would like to see at least another 200 subscribers by Dec. 1.Ten bucks a month is about 100 bucks now. Current cable service is still about 100 bucks. In general, the paid movies seemed to be additive, not replacing either TV or theaters:
TV sets in TM homes are working overtime. Movie attendance doesn't seem to have suffered: any drop-off could easily be ascribed to such things as flu. Censoring of movies isn't an apparent problem and scarcely any complaints have been heard about the moral aspect of TM films.Notice the word that just slipped by? 1957 was a REAL EPIDEMIC but everything else in the world continued running.
Labels: Alternate universe, defensible times
¶ 3:50 PM
