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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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benefit from it financially. Or how much was the cable operator going to benefit and how much was the program supplier going to benefit.

Well, that's all ancient history now. In the meantime, of course, the UHF stations came on the air, with a very poor signal. But the way to get their programs distributed was to add cable to their service, and that brought them up to a par with the VHF stations. So it was a fast-growing business. I think twelve years ago--ten years ago maybe--it was three or four percent of the country had cable, and today it's over sixty percent. So you can see that it's grown very rapidly. It's grown like VCR's have grown, like microwave ovens have grown. Just very, very rapidly.

Now it's gotten to the point where it wants to originate its own programs and compete as a service--as well it should. It's got the means for doing it, in the sense that it's got connections in a lot of homes, and it is also, or could be made to operate a network of telephone services and a lot of other things--interactive cable and so forth.

So it's on the cutting edge of the future, and I think Atlantic Bell or anybody who has the capital and has at least one foot in the communications world would want to acquire a cable system.

Now I own, personally, a cable system in Florida. After I retired--a former associate of mine, when he retired, moved to West Palm Beach and started a cable system there. We had about 42,000 connections, and that's a viable system.

Q:

And the name of the system is?





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