An ambitious effort to arrange a financially happy marriage between TV and Hollywood, Phonevision gives TV set owners a chance to order movies by telephone, at $1 each. Once the order is placed, a simple gadget attached to the TV set and connected to the home telephone unscrambles the movie on the TV screen. Hollywood collects its profit and the set owner is charged on his telephone bill. Last fall Hollywood released for the Chicago test more than 90 films made during the past three or four years.
The above was from
Time magazine, January 8, 1951.
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A simple gadget indeed! I wonder how long it worked between service calls...
Wow, 90 movies! That's like 5 or 6 good ones. And they charge more than Netflix too. I guess I'm a little skeptical that this will find an audience.
It sounds like an early broadcast version of pay-per-view. I imagine if it had caught on, someone would have reverse engineered it and started selling pirate versions of the box, the way it later happened with cable boxes, satellite receivers, ITunes, etc.
Wasn't this how the masses in Terry Gilliam's Brazil watched TV at work?
Adjusted for inflation, that's a rental fee of $8.31 in 2009.
@#2 are you joking or didn't you read the whole post?
"The above was from Time magazine, January 8, 1951. Radio: Phonevision"
up next on the history channel:
willing slaves provide information to big brother about themselves just because they are lazy.
after the break:
how to be cool by getting a chip planted under your skin.
pay-per-view, not on-demand..
Here is a 1947 Popular Science blurb about it along with a picture of the system in operation.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/04/early-pay-per-view-tv/
Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonevision
unscramble
it's like saying magic