Back in the late 1960s, the movie theater industry launched a PR blitz called “Save Free TV”! Urging people to pressure Congress to make a law against paying for Cable TV. The NAB has a similar scare campaign at the moment that if radio has to start paying performers for playing their music (like SiriusXM and Pandora do), that will be the death knell for “free” radio and we’ll all be held hostage by some foreign country.<\/p>\n
The theater owners figured that if people could watch movies at home, their business was dead. People would stop going out to see a movie. The particular theater I was working at (selling newspapers) had been built in the vaudeville days. It had a stage and a pipe organ. What it didn’t have was parking. You either had to take public transit, walk, or try to find parking on a nearby street.<\/p>\n
As Cable TV arrived, the movie theater business had to change. Theaters moved to shopping centers with free parking. Instead of having one huge theater, multiplexes played many movies at the same time. Initially, the movie studios let the theaters have exclusive access to their first run movies – as they started seeing revenue from HBO and VCR rentals, the exclusive time began to shrink. As things have evolved, HBO went into the production business, displacing TV and movie production companies. Things change.<\/p>\n
But Movie Theaters didn’t die. They have changed to give you reasons to still go there. The movie theater I worked at was torn down in the last year and is now a CVS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the late 1960s, the movie theater industry launched a PR blitz called “Save Free TV”! Urging people to pressure Congress to make a law against paying for Cable TV. The NAB has a similar scare campaign at the … Continue reading