Engineering a Revolution
by K.C. Neel -- Multichannel News, 10/12/2008 8:00:00 PM
If it hadn't been for Hub Schlafly, the cable industry might not have been in the position it is today as a leading deliverer of video to millions of consumers around the country. As early as the late 1960s, Schlafly was convinced that geostationary satellite relay would revolutionize the communications business.
In 1972, he teamed up with Sid Topol of Scientific Atlanta in 1972 to build an eight-meter transportable satellite receiver. Schlafly, who at the time was president of the largest MSO, TelePrompTer, demonstrated the technology at the June 1973 National Show in Anaheim, Calif., to much fanfare.
“I am very proud of SpaceCast 1, the satellite we demonstrated in Anaheim,” he said. “We proved satellite transmission of programming was possible. It changed the industry from being a mom-and-pop business to creating national players like Home Box Office and Turner [Broadcasting System].”
At first, the satellite could only transmit three TV channels, but Schlafly pushed for more and that grew to 12 and then 24.
“Of course, this changed the whole complexion of the cable industry,” Schlafly said. “Instead of local entrepreneurs running their cable from the mountaintop down to homes in the valley and delivering distant broadcast signals, it changed to a national programming facility.”
Schlafly's efforts to bring satellite technology to cable were tremendously important, said John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media and former president of Tele-Communications Inc.
“You have to remember that 1973 was a very turbulent time in the cable industry,” Malone recalled. “Hub was hot on what space transmission could do for the industry and he was dead right.”
It was a few years before the programming developed, Malone said, but it took real guts to go out on a limb and not only help build the dishes but buy them for his TelePrompTer cable systems.
“Hub was the biggest technological thinker at the biggest technological operator at the time, and he is the father of satellite transmission,” Malone said.
Schlafly was clearly the research and development maven of TelePrompTer, the largest cable operator in the country in the 1970s. He had engineering is in his blood.
Born in 1919, Schlafly's dad was an oil wildcatter and would often take young Hub out with him on some of his jobs. Schlafly graduated from Notre Dame University in 1941 with a degree in electrical engineering. He was recruited by General Electric and soon he was assigned to MIT Radiation Laboratory as a Gunfire Control Radar project engineer.
In 1947, he became director of television research for 20th Century Fox. It was there he met actor Fred Barton and Irving Kahn (Irving Berlin's nephew) and the trio formed TelePrompTer a few years later.
The company, which developed a device that displayed text for actors, was wildly successful. But Schlafly, not one to sit idle for very long, came up with an idea for pay television he called Key TV.
Kahn wanted to try out the new technology, but not in New York City where he was suspicious of prying eyes, Schlafly said. Bill Daniels, who was getting his cable TV brokerage firm off the ground, convinced the TelePrompTer partners to buy the cable system in Silver City, N.M., so they could try out their invention there. The system was on the market because the owner knew there would be a miner's strike. He figured a strike would mean his customers wouldn't be able to pay for their cable subscriptions.
Schlafly, Kahn and Barton bought the system to test Key TV. The strike did happen, but as he said in his Cable Center oral history, “everybody was sitting at home and didn't have anything to do, so the subscriber rate went up instead of down. That got us into the cable business.”
Key TV, which used the cable system to transfer information between the system and the subscriber, wasn't successful. But the cable operation was, and by the late 1970s TelePrompTer was the largest operator in the country with 140 franchises.
TelePrompTer proved to be a great “school of cable” for several industry players who eventually went on to become titans of the business. Among the executives who cut their cable teeth at TelePrompTer: Bill Bresnan, chairman of Bresnan Communications; Monty Rifkin, who worked for American Television & Communcations and later formed Rifkin & Associates; and Bob Rosencrans, who started in TelePrompTer's closed circuit division and eventually created Columbia Cable Systems.
With Schlafly at the helm, TelePrompTer was a leader in technological advancements. He conceived and tested multichannel, multidirectional microwave, a technology that Hughes Aircraft would eventually perfect and market as AML Microwave. He also teamed with Paramount, Jerrold Communications and Hamlin engineers to develop the first set-top box.
Operators were having problems with off-air co-channel interference in urban markets and the set-top fixed that problem. He also directed the first installation and testing of two-way transmission demonstrating the effectiveness of the technology in Los Gatos, Calif.
Schlafly holds 18 patents. He's been awarded two Emmy Awards for contributions to cable technology.
Schlafly left TelePrompTer in 1975 after Jack Kent Cooke took control of the MSO following a merger with Cooke-owned American H&B Systems. After Kahn was convicted of bribing a local city official to get a franchise, Cooke took control of the company and discontinued TelePrompTer's research and development operations.
“In order to cut down some of the operating expenses, the new management, under Cooke, decided that there was no need for an R&D department in the company, and so that was closed down completely,” Schlafly said in his Cable Center oral history. “Bill Bresnan became president at that time and [former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond] Schaffer became chairman of the board — good men, both of them good people. But I was disappointed in the cutting out of the R&D department because I felt that we were on the track of many of the things that have now proved to be so profitable in the communication and Internet field. So I resigned from the company, or retired, I guess is the word, in 1975.”
Schlafly's infatuation with satellite transmission and his belief that it would change the industry turned out to be true and it was infectious. Although Cooke wasn't convinced that satellite transmission of signals would benefit the cable industry, Bresnan was a true believer, Schlafly said.
“Bill ordered dishes for 200 systems,” he said, noting that the vote of confidence was enough for other operators to soon follow suit. A new era in the cable industry was born.
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