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Old 08-11-2016, 06:53 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Cleveland had subscription TV for a short time in the early 1980s. The station was on channel 61 and carried standard, unscrambled TV shows (mostly off-network reruns and movies) until 8 p. m., then it switched to STV the rest of the night. The STV programming could only be viewed on TVs with a special pay-TV decoder box and a single-channel UHF antenna especially constructed for channel 61 and only that channel. I saw a few of these antennas in my old neighborhood (an eastern suburb of Cleveland), and there were probably more such antennas on houses closer to town, but the service wasn't nearly as popular there (or anywhere else in the metro area) as the station was hoping it would be.

The Cleveland STV service ended, if I remember correctly, some time before the end of the decade, and subscription TV itself ended not long after that. Detroit also had an STV station on channel 20 (WXON ON TV) which probably lasted about as long as Cleveland's did, or maybe a bit longer since Detroit is a much larger city than Cleveland.

I think pay cable movie channels such as HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, et al., to say nothing of pay-per-view (PPV), finally killed OTA subscription TV. The few stations which had carried the service are now affiliated with networks the likes of The CW and others.

BTW, in the early '70s I remember seeing at least one TV with a Phonevision socket on the rear apron of the chassis. The set was a 1954 Zenith 21" b&w console, the type with a tuner that took two revolutions of the channel selector to cover all 13 channels.
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Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.

Last edited by Jeffhs; 08-11-2016 at 07:03 PM.
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