Friday A/V Club: The Campaigns Against Cable TV

The early development of cable TV was famously hobbled by the
broadcasters’ lobby, which fought hard to keep the cable
competition from emerging. But the broadcasters weren’t alone:
Owners of movie theaters worried they’d lose business if people
could watch more films at home. As Glenn Garvin
wrote recently in Reason,

a California outfit called
Subscription Television Inc….offered a three-channel system
featuring major-league baseball, first-run films, and a handful of
tony cultural and educational programs. Put together by Pat Weaver,
the disgruntled former NBC programmer who invented both the
Today and Tonight shows, Subscription Television
created so much buzz during its few months on the air in 1964 that
it triggered the greatest Hollywood miracle since Cecil B. DeMille
parted the Red Sea: America’s TV executives and movie-theater
operators, blood enemies from birth, united to make war on the
newcomer. Running ads with headlines like “This Could Be the Last
World Series on Free TV,” they launched a pogrom that ended with a
public referendum outlawing pay TV in California.

The spectacle of industries using the ballot box to outlaw
competitors without even the faintest pretext of nobler purpose was
so appalling that Time was moved to wonder if it would
become a regular feature of the American economy: “A united front
of gluemakers, for example, might collect enough votes to ban the
manufacture of Scotch tape. Chrysler could war on General Motors.
Whichever collected the fewest votes would die a corporate death.”
Courts would eventually overturn the referendum, but by then
Subscription Television’s contractors and investors were gone with
the regulatory wind.

In 1969, theater owners went on another “Save Free TV” crusade,
lobbying congressmen for protection and showing anti-cable clips
before features. Here’s an artifact of that campaign:

The most transparently disingenuous line: “Pay TV and cable TV
companies are seeking the right to charge you for the very programs
you now get free!” Right. That’s how companies planned to make
money from cable: by persuading people to pay for shows they could
already watch without paying. Not by offering them programs they
otherwise couldn’t see.

Bonus links: If you think these protectionist crusades
are just a thing of the past, wise up here.
For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.