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a stretch Mercedes Benz and eat in the best places, and so on so on, and it makes it very difficult to maintain comparability of status, pay, etc.
Let me just ask you a very general question: with Time--correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me--controlling a good percentage of the cable in New York City, at any rate--is that correct?
Well, the only cable there was in New York City was in Manhattan, and we owned the lower half of Manhattan and Teleprompter owned the upper half.
What if any public policy issues were involved with that
Strangely enough, not very many at that time, because it wasn't as if everybody wanted to lay cable in Manhattan. It's a very complicated bit of business. You've got to get permissions from not only the city, but AT&T, Con Ed; you got to go down into the bowels of the city and then string your wire, and then string it into apartment houses and get permission from the apartment house and string it all the way up 48 floors. So it's a very complicated thing, and that's why cable started essentially out in the countryside where it was a way of picking up signals with higher quality. It started in the city to some degree for the same reason, because the city being built the way it is--namely, very high--television signals had terrible shadow problems. There were places where you couldn't receive the picture, or there was
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