Word: fcc
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Samuel Goldwyn first pondered the possibilities of pay television, he saw it as the embodiment of progress -"and nobody yet," he exclaimed, "has shown the way to stop progress." Goldwyn was clearly uninformed about the procrastinating ways and restricted means of the Federal Communications Commission. In fact, the FCC dallied until this month, some 17 years later, before authorizing the U.S.'s first nationwide and permanent pay-TV service. And by now, with the networks having cornered most of the programming properties, the success of "fee-vee" is hardly assured...
...Cowed by such a campaign, the FCC felt that all it could do was authorize a few experimental fee-vee operations. And none was on a large enough scale to test either the hopes or the fears of the contending interests. A pilot system was franchised in Denver but never got on the air. A Bartlesville, Okla., project lasted nine months. Other projects were quickly aborted in New York City and Chicago. Fee-vee's most promising and disheartening trial came in Los Angeles. Just as the operation seemed to be catching on, the broadcasters and film exhibitors forced...
...decoding system, the Zenith Radio Corp. Neither firm expected to make a profit with such a small test market. But both were encouraged enough by the steadfastness of subscribers to continue the experiment. Zenith is working on a more sophisticated decoder with automated billing and has long petitioned the FCC for a go-ahead in other markets. Now, after years of knuckling under to the anti-pay lobby and its friends in Congress, the commission approved more fee-vee, but hesitantly. The authorization will not take effect for six months, pending congressional review. And the new pay-TV charter contains...
Despite the FCC's well-hedged go-ahead, therefore, the future of pay TV is still uncertain, at best. Joseph Wright, board chairman of Zenith Corp., believes that start-up and production of sufficient decoding devices will mean a year's delay between FCC authorization and actual premiere of a new pay channel. And that would be in just one market, perhaps where Zenith maintains its headquarters: the city of Chicago...
...Chicago--"The Strategy of Confrontation" -- starring his police department, and in it charged that the news media "responded with surprising naivete and were incredibly misused." Letters from angry citizens--almost unanimously critical of the networks--poured into the studios of NBC and CBS, and into the office of the FCC as well, prompting an investigation of the major networks' coverage...