Pay-Per-View: The Next Wave in Movie Watching?

The history of the motion picture business in America, said Larry Hilford, chairman of Orion Home Entertainment Corp., is a tale of cannibalism.

The nation’s movie audience was first devoured by television, he recalled. Then the networks’ audience for prime-time showings of feature films was nibbled away by cable, which in turn has fallen prey to the VCR revolution and the home video market.

Now circling the neighborhood store, Hilford suggested gloomily, is the land shark of pay-per-view technology, which enables people at home to choose--on the spur of the moment--to watch a movie and be billed later by their cable company.

But Edward Bleier, president of Warner Brothers’ Pay TV and Network Feature unit, disagreed, insisting that PPV--as it is known--is “not cannibalization, but nourishment” for the film industry.

Their exchange came Thursday during a panel discussion of pay-per-view at the Western Cable Assn. Show in Anaheim. The three-day convention, which ended Friday, drew about 225 exhibitors and 9,500 participants, according to convention officials, both up from last year.

Bleier maintained that each successive wave of technology has served to reconstruct “a culture of people who have come back to movies as an entertainment staple.”

With pay-per-view, consumers have one more alternative to standing in line at a theater, to hoping that the cassette they want hasn’t already been rented at the video store, or to waiting to see what the pay cable services such as HBO and Showtime are offering for the night.

Either a telephone call or the hit of a button on a remote control unit will order up a movie. The price for each showing, now about $5, is expected to fall to about midway between the cost of a theater ticket and the cost of renting a tape. PPV features should be available within a few weeks of when they arrive at video stores, about four months before they are exhibited on the pay cable services.

A study prepared by Paul Kagan Associates of Carmel, Calif., which was presented at the session, predicted that PPV viewership would climb sharply in the next 10 years, producing revenues of $3.7 billion by 1997. Although the overwhelming portion of that would be generated by movie viewing, the study found, just over 10% would be produced by PPV’s other selling point--”special events” like boxing matches.

“It could be the wave of the future,” Bleier said, “but there’s a terrible bottleneck from the retail point of view.”

About 12% of the nation’s cable TV subscribers currently have the pay-per-view option, the panelists said. But Bleier said many of the systems offering it have failed to promote the movies adequately, or to allocate more than a single channel on their systems to the service. Thus, many people who might choose to see a movie don’t, either because they don’t know what is playing, or because the time of the showing is not convenient.

Beyond a generally affirmative response to the panel’s topic, “Pay-Per-View and Home Video: Can They Live in Peace?,” participants agreed on few details apart from the fact that PPV would continue to grow for the next decade.

Panelists disagreed, for example, about whether PPV movies should be coded to prevent home taping.

“The VCR is an integral part of the television,” said James Heyworth, president of Home Premiere Television, one of the major PPV suppliers, as Orion’s Hilford shook his head. At the higher price that viewers pay to watch the movie, Heyworth said, they should be permitted to tape for use at a more convenient time.

PPV providers such as Jeffrey Reiss of Request, another major supplier, maintained that for the concept to reach its full potential, cable operators would ideally allocate between 4 and 8 channels to PPV, in order to give viewers an adequate range of choices and starting times.

According to Ed Bennett, executive vice president of Viacom Cable, his company’s rentals jump 45% when systems go from one PPV channel to two.

In some ways, the panelists agreed, PPV will never be able to compete with video stores, particularly the “social browsing” ambiance of the emporiums, which often leads to alternative rental when the tapes of choice are not available.

And if home taping of PPV is prohibited, they said, the flexibility of renting cassettes and being able to stop them with the push of a button on the VCR will continue to be a selling point, especially to parents of young children.

The home video industry certainly has no intention of rolling over for pay-per-view.

Home video and PPV may be able to live in peace, said Scott A. Beck of Blockbuster Video, a chain of video superstores, during a question and answer period. But he urged those at the well-attended session to bear in mind that “the home video of tomorrow is not the same as it is today.”

In Detroit, for example, his chain expects to have outlets with 10,000 titles each, located within a mile and a half of most of its potential customers, and is considering the possibility of home delivery.