TURNER URGES CABLE TV TO JUMP ON AD WAGON

The way Ted Turner sees it, the grand solution to all of cable TV’s woes is salesmanship .

“We have to gather more advertising support so we can spend more on programming,” Turner told a crowd of 850 at Wednesday’s opening session of the Western Cable Television Show in Anaheim. Noting that the commercial networks, their affiliates and independent stations spend about $5 billion annually on programming versus about $1.5 billion by basic and pay cable, Turner completed the math with generously rounded numbers: “We’re being outspent 4 to 1 and their service is free .”

In other words, you have to sell more ads to earn more revenue to spend more on programs to make a better product to make more money.

Turner, who was introduced with an anecdote about how he sold an out-of-state cable operator on the idea of carrying his little Atlanta station’s programs 11 years ago, probably could have convinced the audience that the rest of the opening session would be as interesting as he was.

But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. After a brief talk, Turner said he had to race to the airport to catch a plane to take him to a meeting with his Soviet partners in the Goodwill Games.

That left no time to answer such questions as whether his pending deal to purchase MGM suddenly had him favoring high-priced, studio-produced shows for cable, an element hardly in evidence on his own WTBS.

But if the remaining talks at the Anaheim Hilton failed to inspire, the spirit of salesman Turner lingered at the adjoining Convention Center, where about 8,000 cable operators and their guests are getting to see some 200 exhibits through today.

“Would you like to shore up your basic service with a 24-hour, commercial-free movie channel? Think about that,” Larry Jennings suggested to a potential customer who had skirted the air space of the Nostalgia Channel’s booth. Twenty-five cents per cable subscriber per month--$1.25 if you want to use it as a pay service--is all it takes for such films as “Misadventures of Buster Keaton,” “The Stars Look Down” and “White Zombie.”

How can Larry Jennings offer such a deal? Simple: Rights to all the movies on the Nostalgia Channel are owned by Telemedia, which is owned by Futuresat Industries, which also owns 40% of the Nostalgia Channel.

That’s not exactly the kind of stuff Ted Turner is talking about, but then, Anaheim is not exactly Cannes, either. To the “ops” (the men and women who own or operate cable systems, or, more likely, represent the corporations that do so) on this exhibition floor, mid-split distribution systems and foam dielectric coaxial cable can be as important as movies and shows.

Scrambling and decoding systems are a particularly big draw this year, thanks to a slowing cable growth that has operators more concerned than ever about free users who illegally tap their backyard pole lines. While pay-TV channels like Home Box Office and Showtime implement plans to scramble their satellite feeds to cable operators, individual systems also are scrambling their cable transmissions to foil free users.

Many of the booths are also given over to space for program sources like the Arts & Entertainment Network and the Discovery Channel looking to sign new “fils” (affiliates who carry their program services) or to shoot the breeze with existing ones. The USA Network, apparently thinking that its free “Rocky” posters (USA is prominently featured covering the fights in “Rocky IV”) weren’t enough, added some additional punch by bringing along its own star, Dick Cavett.

Asked how big a thrill it was to be appearing at the Anaheim Convention Center, Cavett replied, “Ask me in 10 minutes. I just got here.”

But it was the latest hybrid of technology and entertainment--pay-per-view--that has inspired what seemed to be the most appliances and services. “It’s putting cable back into the revenue stream that went by them,” said Bennett Boyd of EventTeleVision. That’s one of the many companies convinced it can cut into the home videocassette market by transmitting movies and other programs via cable on an individual event basis bearing a one-time charge.

EventTeleVision, a partnership venture with successful cable companies, including Group W, Warner Amex and ATC, is so confident of pay-per-view’s potential that it is offering to pay operators 22 cents per subscriber each month, whether or not those subscribers actually buy movie showings. Operators would normally make their money sharing the “takes” from pay-per-view--from $3 to $5 or so per take, the cable equivalent of a single-ticket purchase. But Boyd said his firm recognizes that operators have big start-up costs and need the safety net as an incentive to get the service going.

Related hardware and services on the exhibition floor included addressable decoder/converters--home cable boxes that allow the cable operator to essentially turn on or off any channel in any given home. (That capability is a prerequisite for pay-per-view.)

Then there’s the Impulser, a gizmo that plugs into the home phone line and allows the consumer to purchase a pay-per-view selection on impulse . “We’re the only true on-impulse pay-per-view,” said Jeffrey Flower, a programmer-sales representative.

While many pay-per-view services are satisfied to have their customers earn their films the old-fashioned way--by picking up the telephone--Flower contends that punching in a phone number and coding that could run as long as 22 digits gives viewers time enough to decide they didn’t really want to pay for that view, anyway. The Impulser is intended to eliminate any second thoughts--although Flower acknowledged that you can cancel on impulse, too.

The Sprucer, from Japanese cable giant Kanematsu-Gosho, goes one step better: It is a two-way addressable converter that not only allows the sophisticated couch potato to select a movie with the press of a button, it also allows the cable operator to change the station for you between viewings. The idea here is that the pay-per-view station will be on screen when you turn on the set, thereby heightening that impulse to buy-and-view.

Perhaps the most exciting new product, combining the best of hardware and software, is Weststar Technologies’ Videotoken Network. As demonstrated in the Weststar roving screening room, a truck decked out with plush couches and numerous color TV sets, the system truly transforms TV use, giving the viewer all sorts of menus and directories from which to choose. A built-in computer memory stores each of these temporarily, allowing the user to control the movement of the directory information on screen, much as on a home word processor.

There’s even an interactive football game of sorts.

Best of all for the Western Show enthusiasts, Videotoken has the salesmanship routine down to a science. Interactive games or movies selected on a pay-per-view basis are shown as requested. But once you’re through, a billing routine appears on the screen. If you fail to comply via telephone within a certain period--measured in minutes--the central computer locks up the screen.

Ted Turner would be proud.