American Radio Library has added a 1955 Zenith promotional brochure that I haven’t seen before. It’s mostly PR puffery, claiming lots of World’s Firsts that weren’t really firsts. It does have some unfamiliar pictures of the Phonevision idea.
Phonevision was Zenith’s attempt at subscriber TV. It was tried in NYC on a small audience in 1954, but FCC didn’t like the idea and didn’t approve it for broader use. Later, of course, cable TV used the same sort of decoding box for paid subscribers. Phonevision used the regular broadcast transmitters, so it didn’t have enough bandwidth to show more than one movie at a time. Some accounts claim it was able to multiplex three or four movies with degraded quality, but this brochure only mentions one at a time. Hardwired cable is able to multiplex on a much higher carrier frequency.
Proposed methods of selling the codes:
Fashion model posing with a TV:
The ‘magic brain’ encoder in action:
Polistra's Mill 