I grew up in rural South Florida in the late 70s and 80s and where we lived was not wired for cable for several years. I didn't even know cable existed. I remember going up north to NY to visit relatives and they had HBO and I was obsessed with it. We visited for Christmas 1977 and I must have read their HBO guide until I wore it out. I could not believe there was something that existed where uncut movies were able to be viewed on television. I was maybe 8 years old, and I remember sneaking downstairs after everyone went to bed to try and watch a few movies before they signed off for the evening. I think the only thing I got to see on that trip was Demon Seed and El Grande De Coca Cola.
A couple years later, our area got a service called ONTV, which was for neighborhoods not wired for cable. It was the same sort of service as HBO but it came through a UHF channel. The set top box was a descrambler. They would show 3 movies a night, and on the weekends, programming would begin in the afternoons with family fare. They also had a soft core package that was a separate cost for films that would air on the weekends after 11pm.
We got it in early 1980 and had it for 18 months. I watched so many movies I would have never been exposed to had it not been for that service, from Young Frankenstein to O Lucky Man. I don't think the cable networks had exclusives back then, but the smaller and/or older films had to fill up the calendar because most of those companies could only afford a certain number of big films a month. So we got a lot of fodder, which was okay with me because I was obsessed with movies and would watch anything I could get my eyes on.
I had a small television in my bedroom (no ONTV box) and a few months into having the service, I discovered that every television could get the UHF channel that ONTV was carried on, only it was scrambled. You could hear it, but not see it. I also discovered that if you turned the knob (this tv had no remote) really fast to the channel, it would unscramble for 5-10 seconds and then re-scramble. I remember being an 11 year old when Cruising came to ONTV, hiding in my bedroom and nearly snapping the dial off the tv set, turning it back and forth to the channel to get it to unscramble over and over again for 5-10 seconds.
We wound up moving to a new neighborhood later that year and it was wired for cable. My parents were big movie fans, too, so we got all four movie channels, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and The Movie Channel. So much overlap, but I was like an addict. I had to watch everything. And my parents let me have cable in my room (only no movie channels).
And then in March of 1982, the most wonderful thing happened- On a Friday night, I was flipping channels in my room and I came across the weirdest movie which turned out to be the beginning of the music video for Van Halen's Oh Pretty Woman. MTV had arrived unannounced on our cable system. It's what I watched from the moment I got home from school to the moment prime time television started for the evening, and then put it on with no sound in my bedroom so I could watch it without my parents hearing after I went to bed.
