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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Stanton:

If CBS were to--say fifteen or twenty years, when we knew we could do this--if we had said, “Well, we're going to start a satellite service at the same time we have the conventional service,” our affiliates would have screamed bloody murder. Because if you owned a station in Omaha, and had all your capital tied up in that station, and then these bastards in New York were going to put it up there on the--

Q:

Absolutely. Yes.

Stanton:

“So I'd be out of business.” And how do you get from A to B--even though you know that you're going to end up at B in the year 2050. How do you get there with an even transition? And cable, of course, has filled that gap--and maybe filled it forever and foreclosed the opportunity of doing with satellite.

If I had the capital, I would love to make the case for doing it up in the sky. I don't know how I'd collect for it, except through advertising, which is way we collect for it today anyway. But I don't know how I'd collect for putting movies on, because that would mean I'd have to put some kind of a gadget on your receiver. And if you were honest, you would pay me; but if you weren't honest, you would screw me one way or another by converting the receiver so it could get it without charging the fee.

It's got its difficulties, too. But if you're just looking at it in terms of the free television service that we have today, advertiser-supported, you could do one tremendous job from the sky. Cost a lot of money to equip the homes; but it costs a lot of money to wire them, too, so--

Whether it will happen or not, I don't know. I won't live to see it, I'm sure. But certainly it





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