Word: hbo
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Showtime, started and still half-owned by Viacom, a company active in many entertainment fields, has leaped from 92,000 subscribers in 1977 to 675,000 now. Many had watched HBO programs until January, when Teleprompter bought half of Showtime and switched from HBO's service to Showtime's on all Teleprompter cable systems. Showtime does not offer sports; it concentrates on movies and entertainment specials, many for an older audience attuned to country and western music. But it is trying more adventurous approaches too. In March it treated viewers to a peek at the topless chorus girls...
...World Series and Super Bowl; viewers who now see them free would then have to pay to watch. Speaking privately, however, other network bosses often boast that their operations so dwarf those of any cable operator that for the moment they can loftily ignore cable. Nonetheless, predicts HBO's Levin, as cable presents better programming, "it will be harder for the networks to aggregate the kind of audiences they are accustomed to." In other words, the hot new network sitcom of, say, 1985 may draw a few million fewer viewers than the 50 million who now watch Mork & Mindy...
...HBO has begun transmitting on a second channel, offering a selection of family programs: G and PG movies rather than the R-rated flicks often seen on the parent service, and a series of quality children's programs. That, says Chairman Gerald Levin, is only the start: "The consumer will be presented with many services from which to choose, each slightly less broad-based, until we get down to a pottery channel...
...relatively impartial studies indicate that all this poses little threat to the networks. Cable appeals to viewers uninterested or only mildly interested in the networks' sitcoms, cop shows and soap operas. Cable fans tend to be older than the Three's Company-Happy Days buffs; Showtime, HBO's biggest rival in pay-cable programming, aims many of its specials at an audience aged 40 to 45. A 1978 survey by Young & Rubicam and A.C. Nielsen Co. found that people whose sets are hooked to cable have highly "fragmented" viewing habits. They switch a lot from channel...
...Pallisers "a kind of comic historical waxworks." Almost all eventually fell under its spell, however, agreeing that the series was one of the few that could actually tie viewers to the set week after week. The program has also been shown in the U.S. on Home Box Office, providing HBO with a surprise...