Super TV was an early form of subscription television which was offered to the public as either a standalone service to the many customers at that time who did not have access to full-blown pay-cable cable services in their area(s) such as HBO & Showtime, or as an additional viewing alternative thereto.
In those days before home videocassettes and discs had made large forays into the home-entertainment market, Super TV, like its competitors, OnTV, SelecTV and Spectrum served as the only available outlet in order to see recently-run movies & various musical specials all unedited and commercial-free. After originally operating in the Washington, D.C. area beginning in November 1981 on UHF channel 50 WFTY (presently WDCW), Super TV expanded into the Baltimore area in July 1982 on channel 54 WNUV. Unlike other pay TV channels, Super TV only broadcast from 7pm to 1am Monday - Friday and 3 pm to 1 am weekends throughout its' entire run and never went 24-hour.
Subscribers received a 12 inch by 12 inch brown decoder box and a dedicated UHF antenna which was installed on the roof or on a balcony and aimed at the station's transmitter. When attached to a television, the box would filter in the Super TV movie channel. In the evening, subscribers could view a host of movies that were scheduled to play at that time.
A wide variety of 70's & 80's films including The China Syndrome, Ordinary People, Private Benjamin, 9 to 5, The Exorcist, Diner, Flashdance, On Golden Pond, Ran, 48 Hrs. and Poltergeist were some of the more popular films that aired. The channel did feature foreign & independent film, as well as the occasional horror film, but they primarily stayed away from films in the slasher genre, which was enormous at the time. For an additional monthly charge, Super TV also aired an after hours program titled "Night Life", where adults could watch soft-core versions of adult shows and movies; This service typically ran from 11pm to 2am Thursday - Sunday only. Customers who did not pay for this service found their signals scrambled shortly after the beginning of the "Night Life" intro. Super TV subscribers also received a monthly or weekly movie guide, in catalog format, telling them when their favorite films would be playing. Because of its limited broadcast hours, they often limited repeat runs of certain films to once or twice a month.
The decoder used was the Zenith SSAVI (sync suppression and video inversion) decoder and had no external controls other than a small chrome colored button on its top to select normal television or Super TV. The station could address each box individually to authorize decoding of programs, including one-time broadcasts or adult program options. To defeat simple descrambling techniques, video inversion was done selectively, often when the video frame was light overall, thus causing the scrambled picture to remain darker than the elevated sync pulses. In certain cases, video was inverted on alternate frames.
The audio transmitted on the standard audio channel was a "barker" announcement, informing would-be customers that Super TV was a scrambled service and required a subscription. The audio for the Super TV movies was instead transmitted on a subcarrier which would later be used to transmit the difference signal of multichannel television sound (MTS) after 1984. Until 1985 when the first MTS sets became available, normal televisions would not decode the audio, however shortly afterward, the barker channel would play on the right and the mono movie sound would play on the left.
Super TV was popular until many issues rendered it obsolete in 1986. In addition to the MTS-capable televisions being able to receive the audio, a few set manufacturers attempted to incorporate cable-descrambler boxes right inside their sets, eliminating the need for set-top boxes and making recording off the air a lot easier.
These sets were quickly legislated out of existence, but by then the damage had been done, with the decoding circuitry being published in magazines such as Popular Science for any and all to construct from commonly-available components.
But by 1986, Cable TV services started expanding and were serving areas not previously covered. The popularity of video rentals took off at an enormous rate a couple of years earlier, so by 1987 the home entertainment choices went from zero to plenty and nobody cared about $11.95 a month for one channel five hours a night anymore.
Moreover, pay TV giants like HBO and Showtime were now heavily buying film packages from the major studios, and declaring them as exclusives and off limits to channels like Super TV (Spotlight Pay TV & Los Angeles' ZTV who were two other major casualties at the time). Attempts to partner Super TV with other similar services or with a sports programmer were unsuccessful. Ultimately, its two UHF affiliates (WFTY ch 50 & WNUV) were once again turned into full time independent UHF channels, and like every other UHF subscription station, eventually became either Home Shopping or Spanish-network affiliated. Today, very few items of Super TV memorabilia, such as T-shirts and movie guides, exist on the collector's market.
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