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ON-TV was a subscription television service, also known as National Subscription Television, launched in 1977 by Oak Industries and Norman Lear's Chartwell Enterprises. Oak was a manufacturer of satellite and pay-TV decoders and equipment.

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 transmitted over-the-air on a UHF station.

The technology was sometime called multipoint distribution system. Viewers without decoder boxes saw a scrambled, flickering picture and garbled audio. Since the signal went out over-the-air, it was a popular target for signal pirates.[1]

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.

Basic service was $19 a month, plus an extra charge for a block of softcore pornography marketed as "ON Plus." Oak developed plans of a second ON-TV channel, which never appeared. As cable TV became more widely available, ON-TV's popularity declined.[2]

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).

In 1983, ON-TV merged its Los Angeles operations 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.

ON-TV began broadcasting in Chicago in 1980, airing on WSNS-TV 44. The service went dark in 1983, largely due to the long-awaited entrance of cable television into Chicago. During ON-TV's three year tenure, and for several years thereafter, WSNS was involved in numerous lawsuits related to ON-TV's late night adult programming.[3]

• The history of UHF pay-tv in Chicago

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