Baseball Changes Channels: The Dodgers, the Giants and the Birth of Pay TV

While commonplace today, pay television didn't exist in the 1950s when the Brooklyn Dodgers' Walter O'Malley and the New York Giants' Horace Stoneham were looking to address attendance declines they believed were caused by overexposure of their teams' games on local television. Their solution was to partner with a dynamic Hollywood entrepreneur named Matty Fox to create a first-of-its-kind subscription television service where TV viewers would become paying customers just like those fans wh...