AHC: Subscription only broadcasting started earlier

Although radio and television have been around for decades, it was all free-to-air until quite recently, many stations basically being advertising services, especially if commercials interrupt programmes. Subscription only radio, in particular, even came after the internet, and hasn't been that successful as far as I know.

The idea is to imagine subscription only broadcasting (both radio and TV) having started decades before the internet, in an age when vacuum tubes dominated. Also, suppose that cable TV had begun at the same time as, or not long after free-to-air, with fewer free-to-air channels, and more bandwidth per TV channel.

When (free-to-air) television was introduced, movies studios criticised for possibly drawing people away form the cinema. Might they have thought differently had pay TV begun earlier, and broadcast of movies been largely confined to that TV sector?

Does it count if the government requires that everyone who owns a television must be a subscriber ? If so then the BBC fits the description.

Cheers,
Nigel.

From 1946 onwards for TV. We Brits also needed a licence for the wireless from 1923 to 1971. You needed a separate one for the radio in your car!(However the TV licence included the radio licence for the home)

Radio and TV licences

A licence fee and subscription fee and different things. Licence fees are a way of funding public broadcasters, and basically anyone owning a receiver, which may also be able to receive independent broadcasts, must buy a licence which funds the public broadcaster.

The UK law basically says that one must buy a license from the BBC to own a television which in turn can be used to receive many television broadcasts other than the BBC in addition to BBC content.
With subscription only broadcasting, you only need to subscribe to access the content, not to own the receiver. And subscription only broadcasting has some means of conditional access.

The problem is you have to have digital broadcasting, encryption, editing, etc.

I don't know how many MIPS the processors used to decode the signal have, but I'd bet that in the mid-60s, you're looking at mainframe level computing required.

Cable television actually has been around for decades in the United States. When broadcast television dominated, some rural areas couldn't receive signals with home antennas. Companies would build large antennas to receive the signals and then sell them to subscribers. Because the equipment was so powerful they could receive signals from several markets, so rural customers actually had more channels to choose from if they had cable.

It took a change in law sometime around the 1970s or 1980s to allow cable operators to enter areas served by broadcast television. It was a major issue for the broadcasters because they were granted spectrum rights in exchange for free access, and cable threatened to reduce market share. It wasn't an issue earlier because a small portion of the market had cable licenses, and the extra channels were mostly local access and news for other markets as opposed to unique content.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

The problem is you have to have digital broadcasting, encryption, editing, etc.

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Pay TV was originally analog, using a technique called scrambling, one way to do this was to invert certain lines in a certain way, most likely different for each channel, and probably changed at the interval the subscription fee was charged.

Delta Force said:

Cable television actually has been around for decades in the United States. When broadcast television dominated, some rural areas couldn't receive signals with home antennas. Companies would build large antennas to receive the signals and then sell them to subscribers. Because the equipment was so powerful they could receive signals from several markets, so rural customers actually had more channels to choose from if they had cable.

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Yes, I've heard of that, but you seem to have had free-to-air television since 1941. Didn't cable begin later than that?

Delta Force said:

It took a change in law sometime around the 1970s or 1980s to allow cable operators to enter areas served by broadcast television. It was a major issue for the broadcasters because they were granted spectrum rights in exchange for free access, and cable threatened to reduce market share. It wasn't an issue earlier because a small portion of the market had cable licenses, and the extra channels were mostly local access and news for other markets as opposed to unique content.

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But what if all indepedent television broadcasting had been by cable right from the start, with free-to-air being dedicated to the public broadcaster(s) with fewer free-to-air channels and more bandwidth per channel.

It seems that the BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK at the time they had radio licences.

Myrtonos said:

Pay TV was originally analog, using a technique called scrambling, one way to do this was to invert certain lines in a certain way, most likely different for each channel, and probably changed at the interval the subscription fee was charged.

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Doing some googling, it seems that Videocipher was the first widely used scrambling system, and it uses DES encryption. So clearly we're not talking pure analog here. Moreover, the best description I can find of the electronics of the descrambler compares it to a Commodore 64 circuit board. That's a LOT of computation for much earlier. For instance, the first IBM 360 mainframe seems to be roughly comparable. (Slower clock than a C64, same memory, bigger word size.)

So...
In 1965 your Pay TV would require a top-of-the-line IBM mainframe to convert your signal to something viewable. In every home.
As far as I can tell, anyway.


Edit: I tell ya, you young whippersnappers these days. Back in my day....

Myrtonos said:

A licence fee and subscription fee and different things. Licence fees are a way of funding public broadcasters, and basically anyone owning a receiver, which may also be able to receive independent broadcasts, must buy a licence which funds the public broadcaster.

.

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But as a practical matter, before about 1960 or so, they would have been the same thing. The only practical way to control who could watch the "pay" channels would be through control of the equipment.

Most areas would have only a handful of channels, since generating the programming would have been the limiting factor. In the U.S., even large cities had no more than about a half dozen channels. It would have been possible to have some of those channels be incompatible in some way with the others. So the incompatible channels could be "pay" channels and the other ones "free" channels. But even if you could get one set to watch both kinds, it seems to me that the technology to convert from one to the other would be rather expensive. And since there's no good way to change the coding in real time, the "pay" system would really depend on whoever you are paying be the owner of the converter.

In about 1980, my area briefly had one "pay" channel. The scrambling method wasn't particularly sophisticated, so it didn't require much additional equipment in addition to the existing set. But because it was relatively simple, a lot of people figured out that they could make one themselves without much difficulty. For that and other reasons, that channel didn't last long. Slightly more successful was a company that delivered HBO by a microwave transmission. But again, a lot of people figured how how to build the receiver, one of the reasons why it failed.

I think it really requires a fair amount of computing power to scramble a signal in such a way that it can be decoded with inexpensive equipment, but also be difficult or impossible to descramble it without that equipment.

Of course, if the signal is being delivered by cable, then it's a lot easier. If people don't pay, you just send someone out to disconnect the cable. You can even filter out individual channels without much difficulty. You'll probably have a few people sneaking out at night and removing the filters, but in general, it wouldn't be too difficult to add a few pay channels to a system that also had less expensive "free" channels.

But the main problem prior to about 1960 would have been generating the content in the first place. Until magnetic recording became inexpensive enough, you would need the equivalent of at least one TV camera and associated equipment for each channel you wanted to show. Even if you just show movies that you already have on film, I think the method of changing them to video amounted to projecting the film image onto a special camera. Carrying existing channels from distant areas, of course, is also possible. But you're limited to what's within a few hundred miles. And there were really only three or four networks anyway, so once you get those three or four stations, there's not much to add.

Here are some examples of the very earliest cable TV systems. As you see, despite herculean engineering, they really weren't able to carrying more than one or two channels:

http://onetuberadio.com/2015/08/26/tv-comes-to-marathon-ontario-1953/
http://onetuberadio.com/2015/06/18/ellensburg-wa-catv-1955/



If I got sent back in time to about 1950 with a few VCR's, DVD players, or computers, along with a few modern cameras (all of which I could probably get at Goodwill for a few hundred dollars), then it would be a pretty simple matter for me to set up a cable TV system with a few dozen channels. I could mostly use equipment from that time period (taking care to make sure I bring back the few items I need to make it all compatible). And if I wanted, I could use content from that time period, such as movies, local announcers, etc. But without the goodies that I brought back with me, the number of channels I could broadcast simultaneously would be very limited. But without those modern resources, I would be limited to systems similar to the two shown above, where I simply retransmit whatever signal I can get from a few hundred miles away.

In short, even if someone had access to already produced programming in the form of films, it's still requires a lot of infrastructure to turn that into one television signal, no matter how you're going to deliver it. So it doesn't really make sense to fragment the market by having some channels "free" and others "pay". Economically, you really need to do it one way or another. Either it's all free, as in the U.S., or it's all some form of "pay" (such as a licensing fee in the U.K.).

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

In 1965 your Pay TV would require a top-of-the-line IBM mainframe to convert your signal to something viewable. In every home.

As far as I can tell, anyway.

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But let's not forget enimga machines.

But other analog scrambling methods did exist. One was to have a pair of records playing at both ends, one adding noise to the signal and another subracting it. Another method was frequency inversion.

rpc said:

But as a practical matter, before about 1960 or so, they would have been the same thing. The only practical way to control who could watch the "pay" channels would be through control of the equipment.

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And this would have worked well only if one broadcasting group had a monopoly over free-to-air broadcasting, such as the BBC in the Great Britain and ABC here in Australia, or ZDF in Germany.

But then again, with fewer free-to-air and more cable channels available to viewers, as would have been the case if earlier television were higher definition, as was actually hoped by John Logie Baird, the inventor of "radio with pictures." In that case, a free-to-air broacasting monopoly would have been more likely and thus one could have controlled free-to-air tuners to control who could watch the channels broacast over the air.

Cable TV would have been controlled much like electricity supply.

rpc said:

Most areas would have only a handful of channels, since generating the programming would have been the limiting factor. In the U.S., even large cities had no more than about a half dozen channels. It would have been possible to have some of those channels be incompatible in some way with the others. So the incompatible channels could be "pay" channels and the other ones "free" channels. But even if you could get one set to watch both kinds, it seems to me that the technology to convert from one to the other would be rather expensive. And since there's no good way to change the coding in real time, the "pay" system would really depend on whoever you are paying be the owner of the converter.

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This would have been easy if the "incompadible" channels were cable only.

rpc said:

Of course, if the signal is being delivered by cable, then it's a lot easier. If people don't pay, you just send someone out to disconnect the cable. You can even filter out individual channels without much difficulty. You'll probably have a few people sneaking out at night and removing the filters, but in general, it wouldn't be too difficult to add a few pay channels to a system that also had less expensive "free" channels.

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Or even better, there could be a timer which is reset everytime someone pays, automatically disconnecting the cable if not reset.

If free-to-air had been allocated specifically to public broadcasting with fewer channels and higher definition and possibly progressive instead of interlaced scanning, it would have been easly te require licences for ownership of only free-to-air tuners and not cable recievers.

rpc said:

But the main problem prior to about 1960 would have been generating the content in the first place. Until magnetic recording became inexpensive enough, you would need the equivalent of at least one TV camera and associated equipment for each channel you wanted to show. Even if you just show movies that you already have on film, I think the method of changing them to video amounted to projecting the film image onto a special camera. Carrying existing channels from distant areas, of course, is also possible. But you're limited to what's within a few hundred miles. And there were really only three or four networks anyway, so once you get those three or four stations, there's not much to add.

Click to expand...

Actually, video recording was first introduced in 1956, and used FM to record the video part, a technique that was almost never used in audio recording even though it would have eliminated the low frequency limitation.

rpc said:

If I got sent back in time to about 1950 with a few VCR's, DVD players, or computers, along with a few modern cameras (all of which I could probably get at Goodwill for a few hundred dollars), then it would be a pretty simple matter for me to set up a cable TV system with a few dozen channels. I could mostly use equipment from that time period (taking care to make sure I bring back the few items I need to make it all compatible). And if I wanted, I could use content from that time period, such as movies, local announcers, etc. But without the goodies that I brought back with me, the number of channels I could broadcast simultaneously would be very limited. But without those modern resources, I would be limited to systems similar to the two shown above, where I simply retransmit whatever signal I can get from a few hundred miles away.

Click to expand...

Back in 1950, all Television was broadcast live anyway. Let's say you went back to 1950 with a Qudruplex video recorder and a few cameras all dating from the 1960s.

rpc said:

In short, even if someone had access to already produced programming in the form of films, it's still requires a lot of infrastructure to turn that into one television signal, no matter how you're going to deliver it. So it doesn't really make sense to fragment the market by having some channels "free" and others "pay". Economically, you really need to do it one way or another. Either it's all free, as in the U.S., or it's all some form of "pay" (such as a licensing fee in the U.K.).

Click to expand...

The market is currently fragmented, in my country (Australia) we have arial channels that are free and paid cable and satillite. Many other countries have this.

You could have the arial bands all dedicated to public broadcasters (funded by government grants, licence sales or both), with independent broadcasting only on cable. And also have fewer free-to-air channels available to viewers, with more resolution, greater frame rate or maybe both.

Another scenario is to have VHF allocated to one broadcaster group and UHF allocated to another with separate receiver licences for VHF and UHF tuners.