I had OnTV back in the 80s. I lived in the only major city in the US that still hadn’t been wired for cable. To fill the gap, 3 UHF stations sprang up, showing scrambled movies in the evenings. The city council felt they had the last apple in the basket, and forced the companies competing to wire the city to offer the sun and the moon. This backfired, though. Warner won, with the promise of the (then) super high tech Qube system, which was supposed to offer 2-way communication to let you do things like buy things with your cable remote (which was actually tethered by a thick wire to the cable box, and was the size of textbook). The system proved too expensive to fully implement, so Warner eventually bailed, another company took over, they eventually bailed, etc. We’re now back under (Time) Warner again.
The 3 UHF stations created to show scrambled movies still exist. One of them is the current CW station.
