[Jeffhs]

Cleveland had a TV station that operated much like the Hartford station did. The Cleveland station started out in 1968 as WKBF-TV (Kaiser Broadcasting) on channel 61, and was a full-service independent station until it went off the air (financial difficulties) in 1975. This station was replaced in 1982 by WCLQ-TV, also channel 61. This station operated, as Hartford's WHCT did, as a standard television station during the day (receivable just as well as any other local channel in the area), with off-network reruns and movies. However, at 8 p. m. EST, WCLQ-TV switched from commercial to subscription TV, and was scrambled from then until the wee hours of the morning (or perhaps it ran subscription TV all night; I never stayed up late enough to find out). A special antenna (cut especially for channel 61) and a special decoder were required to receive the pay-TV service. The station eventually gave up on pay subscription TV, becoming, in the late '80s IIRC, WQHS-TV, a home-shopping channel. That station ran for some time as an HSN [Home Shopping Network] affiliate (I don't recall how long) before it dropped the network and replaced HSN with Spanish-language programming from Univision, which it has aired (and is still airing, digitally of course since 06.12.09), to this day.

BTW, I picked up a couple of old Zenith TVs years ago (I no longer have them) that had input sockets on the backs of the chassis for a Phonevision decoder. I never saw the Phonevision system in operation (maybe it wasn't available in my area at the time the service was launched, or at any time while it was operational), but I do think it must have been a forerunner of today's pay-cable TV systems, in that a special converter box was required to decode the signal so that it could be viewed, and of course there was the usual monthly fee for the service. I also remember reading an article in Popular Electronics or one of the electronics magazines of the '60s having to do with a Canadian pay-television service called Telemeter, IIRC, in the early 1960s, which was Canada's short-lived answer to Zenith's Phonevision. This service operated much like the American Phonevision system did; however, one difference between the two systems was that Telemeter required that the viewer insert a certain number of coins into the box to view a given movie (the prices of these movies were shown on a special preview channel, which was the default channel the box showed on the viewer's television if no movies were selected). The Canadian Telemeter service also had a feature that supposedly thwarted theft of coins from the converter's coin box. If the viewer initially decided to watch a movie on the service and started to put a coin in the slot, then decided seconds later (!) that he didn't want to see it after all, the box would shut off (likely requiring reactivation by a Telemeter representative) if the viewer tried to pull the coin out of the slot before it dropped into the coin box. If the viewer somehow got inside the Telemeter converter and tried to shake the coins out of the box, the coin box was arranged so that it would lock from the inside, thereby thwarting unauthorized access to and theft of the coins already in it.