Origins
Paramount Pictures has been involved in the pay television business since the 1950s. In the 1950s and 1960s, Paramount owned Telemeter, an ambitious but expensive theater television system which used closed circuits (as opposed to broadcast frequencies), and customers had to purchase broadcasts by dropping coins into a box. In the early 1980s, Paramount (then owned by Gulf+Western), MCA/Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox partnered with Getty Oil to launch Premiere, a cable television service that gave exclusive first run rights to the studios' new features, but an antitrust suit by the U.S. Justice Department filed in 1980 made the venture illegal.
The three studios were some of Showtime's major film suppliers, and Paramount had an output deal with Showtime since 1997, after then-parent Viacom (which also owned Showtime until 2006, when CBS and Viacom split up its assets) purchased Paramount Pictures in 1994. Paramount Pictures' contract with Showtime expired in January 2008, while MGM and Lionsgate's contracts expired at the end of 2008.
Read more about this topic: Epix (TV Channel)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)