The first premium channel

Just in case you thought HBO started it all, Bryan Painter has a piece in this morning's Oklahoman about the real origin of subscription television.

For $9.95 a month, "Telemovie," using a coaxial cable, would feed you 30 films a month, seventeen of them first-run, twelve hours a day — if you happened to be living in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. In 1957.

The Telemovie operation was a joint venture between a hardware manufacturer (Jerrold) and a theater chain (Video Independent Theaters). It lasted about a year. (The Green Channel, the predecessor of HBO, started up in 1970.)

Oh, and Oklahoma also had a half-premium channel for a while. KAUT signed on in the late 1970s with a mixture of news programming during the day — George Tomek anchored "Newswatch 43" — and a scrambled signal during the evening which presented to subscribers an HBO-like channel called Vue. The news programming proved to be expensive, and was dropped after about a year, but Vue was offered at least through the end of 1982. This wasn't even the weirdest mix ever on the station: when Paramount Stations Group acquired it in 1998 and changed its calls to KPSG, the station ran PBS programming in the morning — by agreement with OETA, who had sold it to them — and UPN shows in the evening. (How did OETA get the station in the first place, you ask? The previous owner of channel 43, when it was a Fox affiliate, donated it to the state so that they could buy the presumably-better facillity on channel 25. No, this wasn't Sinclair; that came later.)

Posted at 8:53 AM to Soonerland