Qube

~ the obituary ~

qube sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it launched in columbus, ohio on 1 december '77, seven years before i was born and a quarter of a planet from where i grew up. it ran for about seven years and then disappeared. ankara had no equivalent, turkish cable tv as a public service did not arrive at any scale until the late 1990s. by then qube was a footnote nobody outside the us cable business referenced.

the system was a warner cable experiment, conceived by steve ross after he saw a closed-circuit hotel video setup at the new otani in tokyo and wondered what could be done if cable carried movies on demand and let the viewer talk back. warner partnered with american express in '79 to form warner-amex cable communications, with a board that included the future ibm chief lou gerstner. they picked columbus as the test market because the city had cable franchise availability, a single dominant media market, and a population that read as a usable national sample.

the qube package was thirty channels, ten of them broadcast network feeds, ten premium movie and event channels (pay-per-view was invented here), and ten community channels that could be programmed locally. the remote was the magic. it had a numeric pad for channel selection and a separate row of five buttons labelled one through five that let the viewer respond to on-screen prompts. the head end aggregated the responses in something close to real time and the count could be shown on screen within seconds.

warner-amex was losing serious money on the experiment by '82. the corporate parent had $875 million in debt by '83 across its broader cable operations. mtv and nickelodeon were spun off from warner-amex and sold to viacom in '85. the qube interactive boxes were quietly phased out across '84, the last ones came off the columbus network during that year. there was no formal shutdown ceremony, the service just ended.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

the cable plant in columbus was upgraded to support two-way signalling. the downstream carried thirty channels of video and a low-bandwidth data channel that the head end could use to address individual subscriber boxes. the upstream from each home was a narrow data channel that carried the response button presses back to the head end. the box at the home end had a numeric pad, channel select, and the row of five response keys. every six seconds the head end polled every active box and pulled whatever response was loaded in the small register.

that six-second polling cycle was the design choice that made qube feel interactive even though it was really sampling. a host on a local talk show could ask a question, the audience could press one through five during the next twenty seconds, the host could read back the tally before the segment ended. the whole interaction was small and slow by any later standard but for tv viewers in 1978 it felt like a science fiction trick.

~ the climb ~

the early years in columbus were aggressive. warner-amex built original interactive programming, the most famous show was qube's local talk format the columbus alive, with the audience voting on segment choices. they also ran the first pay-per-view boxing event, a championship fight that drew a few thousand qube buys at $5 each, which was the proof of concept that pay-per-view could work as a business. the same year qube carried the first home-shopping demonstration, viewers could press a button to order a featured product and warner-amex would dial out and confirm the purchase.

mtv and nickelodeon started as warner-amex programming concepts that were piloted on qube channels in columbus before they were launched as national cable networks in '79 and '81. nickelodeon was literally the qube children's channel pinwheel rebranded and syndicated. the qube columbus experiment was the r&d lab for the cable programming model that warner-amex sold to viacom in '85 for a billion dollars.

~ what it influenced ~

the cultural lineage from qube into modern interactive tv is direct. pay-per-view as a commercial concept started here, both technically (the addressable box that could be enabled for one program) and as a billing model. home shopping as a tv format started here, qvc and hsn both trace back to the warner-amex pinwheel children's-channel-plus-home-shopping mix in late 1970s columbus. interactive voting on tv shows traces back to the five-button qube remote.

the less flattering lineage is the data side. qube was also the first system that captured individual household tv viewing in real time, which the warner-amex marketing team quickly understood as a valuable asset. in those days. there was a moment in 1980 when ohio prosecutors asked qube to identify which subscribers had bought a particular adult pay-per-view event in connection with a local court case. warner-amex pushed back, the case did not produce a clean ruling, but the question landed publicly and forced the cable industry to start writing privacy policies.

~ the funny part ~

this part i was not around for, but anyway. by 1980 nielsen and the major advertisers were watching qube very closely as a sampling instrument. for the first time you could ask a real audience a question during a commercial and get the numbers back inside the same break. agencies ran qube tests on ad concepts during shows. several big-budget pilots were workshopped by polling the columbus qube audience and watching the response curve over the act breaks. one of the most-told qube stories is that the original kramer vs kramer test screening for warner ran with qube viewer response measurement, which is partly why the ending was edited as it was. the exact film varies in retelling.

by '83 the cost of running the system had passed the revenue. warner-amex was carrying nine-figure annual losses, and the corporate parent was looking at the broader cable business as the priority. qube was phased out during '84, the boxes were swapped for standard non-interactive cable converters as households needed replacements. by '85 the brand was gone. the spun-off mtv and nickelodeon channels survived the sale to viacom and became the cultural footprint that qube itself never quite achieved.

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