ON-TV

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ON-TV was a subscription television service, also known as National Subscription Television.

There were two basic steps to access ON-TV programming:

• Pay a monthly subscription fee to NSTV, the parent company of the service.
• Receive a converter box which decoded a picture sent to the TV. The picture was located over-the-air on a UHF station.

ON-TV (and other related channels) aired a mixture of movies, sports events, and concerts. For example, the Los Angeles area service aired many home games of the Los Angeles Dodgers, California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim), Los Angeles Lakers, and Los Angeles Kings, as well as some of the day's biggest championship boxing matches.

Among the stations that transmitted ON-TV programs were KBSC Los Angeles (now Telemundo affiliate KVEA), WSNS Chicago (also a Telemundo station), WBTI Cincinnati (now MyNetworkTV station WSTR), WXON Detroit (now WMYD, also an MNTV affiliate), WKID Fort Lauderdale (now Telemundo affiliate WSCV), and KNXV Phoenix (now an ABC affiliate).

NSTV began in the mid-1960s. In the early 1980s, it was also made available on cable systems in the area. In 1983, ON-TV merged with SelecTV, a similar service that was transmitted in Los Angeles on KWHY, now a Spanish-language independent. However, the merger could not forestall the technological changes that made the service obsolete, and the last shows aired sometime around 1987.