VEU

The first over-the-air VEU service launched in Oklahoma City on October 15, 1980, transmitting over the signal of independent station KAUT (channel 43), the only terrestrial VEU distributor to have been owned by service parent Golden West Broadcasters. (At the time, Golden West had also owned KTLA [now a CW affiliate] in Los Angeles, then an established entertainment-based independent station that offered a mix of sporting events, prime time and overnight feature films, a local prime time newscast and some syndicated programs during the nighttime hours. Because of its strong standing in the market, Golden West opted not to have KTLA serve as a VEU charter outlet nor did it seek carriage of the service on other Los Angeles-area independents without an existing a subscription television offering.) For the operation's first few weeks, KAUT exclusively offered VEU programming each weekday from 7:00 p.m. until its 2:00 a.m. sign-off and weekends from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.; programming on the station expanded on November 3, when it launched a weekday daytime and early evening schedule encompassing an all-local news format from sign-on at 12:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m., and low-cost and barter syndicated programs (consisting of talk and game shows) from 5:00 until VEU programming commenced at 7:00 p.m. (KAUT would shift its news block two hours later, from 2:00 to 7:00 p.m., in March 1981; it replaced the news format with a full daytime schedule of syndicated entertainment shows – including sitcoms and drama series, westerns and classic movies – and religious programming that September.)[2][9][10][11][12][13]

The service launched as multichannel television service was beginning to be established in Oklahoma City and surrounding communities, with several cable providers and an MMDS operation having already commenced service in the metropolitan area. Cox Cable and Pan Oklahoma Communications were in the process of wiring the Oklahoma City core. (When the two providers commenced operations in April 1980, Cox serviced the western half of the city and Pan Oklahoma—an African American-owned buildout venture that was majority owned by Cox, which would acquire the company outright in December 1983—provided service to northeastern Oklahoma City, from Western Avenue eastward, and the bordering unincorporated suburb of Forest Park.)[14][15] MMDS service was also provided throughout the city via the single-channel TVQ/Movie Systems, Inc., which began operations in October 1978, providing programming from HBO, Superstation WTBS and supplementary content from eventual KAUT sister station WGN-TV/Chicago (consisting of Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball games) and Nickelodeon (from which TVQ provided additional children's programming until June 1981). Multimedia Cablevision also began providing service to select suburbs and adjacent areas of Oklahoma City as early as 1972 (eventually including among others, Bethany, Edmond, Guthrie, Del City, Choctaw, Harrah, Moore, Nichols Hills, Norman and Yukon), except for Midwest City, which—in areas outside of the Multimedia-serviced Tinker Air Force Base—was served by American Cablevision (which had begun operations in 1979, and would be absorbed into Multimedia's Central Oklahoma operations in May 1984). These suburban services were also in the process of expanding their lineup of cable-originated channel offerings.

In addition to feature films and entertainment specials, the VEU service on KAUT also carried college football and basketball games featuring participating Big Eight Conference universities (particularly involving the Oklahoma Sooners and Oklahoma State Cowboys, the latter of which had their wrestling matches also carried by VEU locally) as well as Dallas Mavericks regular season NBA games. Local FM radio station KKLR (97.9, now WWLS-FM on 98.1) was utilized to simulcast the multichannel audio feed for stereo transmission of music specials on the KAUT service. Cox/Pan Oklahoma and Multimedia's cable operations – which offered 25-channel services providing a variety of programming from various local and cable-originated channels, including premium channels such as HBO, Showtime and, in Cox's Oklahoma City service area, Spotlight (replaced locally by The Movie Channel after Spotlight discontinued operations in February 1984) – grounded what interest there was in VEU to a halt. Oklahoma City became the first market where VEU discontinued service on October 17, 1982, when channel 43 replaced the service with classic television series and select first-run syndicated programs from 7:00 p.m. until its new 11:00 p.m. sign-off on weekdays and on weekend afternoons and evenings.[16]

Upon that station's sign-on on September 29, 1980, VEU commenced its Dallas–Fort Worth operations over independent station KNBN-TV (channel 33), by arrangement with Golden West Broadcasters subsidiary Golden West STV of Dallas. (Ironically, the owners of KNBN founding parent Hill Broadcasting, Nolanda Hill and Sheldon Turner, successfully lobbied the Dallas City Council to charter a cable television franchise in the city.) Channel 33 offered VEU programming each weekday from 7:00 p.m. until its 2:00 a.m. sign-off and Saturdays and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., with the remainder of its initial schedule consisting of business news programming (running weekdays from 8:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.) and a limited amount of entertainment programs (from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. weekdays and weekends from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.). In addition to feature films and entertainment specials, the VEU service on KNBN also offered college football and basketball games featuring Big Eight and Southwest Conference universities as well as telecasts of regular season Dallas Mavericks NBA games.

In September 1982, Golden West STV of Dallas purchased the Metroplex-area operations of competing subscription service Preview from Time, Inc.'s cable television subsidiary, American Television and Communications (ATC).[17] Following a 90-day simulcasting period,[18] on December 1, 1982, VEU moved its programming entirely to the former Preview outlet, independent station KTWS-TV (channel 27); concurrently, KNBN-TV expanded its schedule of English language business and syndicated entertainment programming as well as its existing part-time affiliation with the Spanish International Network (the forerunner to the present-day Univision, now carried locally on network-owned KUVN-DT [channel 23]) in VEU's former time period (from 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. weekdays and 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. weekends).

As cable television became more widely available in Dallas, Fort Worth and its adjacent suburbs through ATC (later known as Time Warner Cable following Time's 1989 merger with Warner Communications and the resultant merger of ATC and Warner Cable Communications, the latter of which had provided cable service to most of the Dallas area since beginning local operations in January 1982) and Sammons Communications (which served its headquarters of Fort Worth as well as the suburbs of Duncanville and the Park Cities, until Sammons sold its Metroplex-area franchises to Marcus Cable upon its operational wind down in March 1995[19]), VEU suffered a significant decline in subscribers who chose to migrate to multichannel services offering cable-originated basic and premium channels; this saw VEU discontinue its Dallas–Fort Worth operations on September 30, 1984, effectively ending Golden West's regional subscription television operations. (Concurrent with this, Golden West Broadcasting had already started to divest its television assets—beginning with KTLA [which it sold to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in October 1982] and subsequently, KAUT [which it sold to Rollins Communications in February 1985]—under a divestiture order from the California Government in effect since shortly after Gene Autry's wife, Ina Mae Autry, died in May 1980.)

Golden West Broadcasters periodically floated the expansion of VEU's subscription television service to other markets; however, these plans would never come to fruition. Another of Golden West's subscription television subsidiaries, Golden West STV of Providence, planned to start up a subscription television operation over fledgling independent station WSTG (channel 64, now Fox affiliate WNAC-TV) in Providence, Rhode Island;[20] however, that service ultimately would never launch.

Additionally, Chicago was listed on a handful of occasions as a planned expansion target, which would have resulted in VEU joining an already crowded STV field in that market that included ONTV (carried over WSNS-TV [channel 44, now a Telemundo owned-and-operated station] from September 1980 until July 1985), Spectrum (carried over WFBN [channel 66, now Univision owned-and-operated station WGBO-DT] from September 1981 until February 1984) and Sportsvision (carried over WPWR [channel 60, now a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station on channel 50] from April 1982 until January 1983).[21]

One prospective VEU outlet ended up as one of the most visible signs of the service, even though it never actually hosted a VEU operation, because of its call letters. Even though Golden West Broadcasters had incorporated an STV subsidiary under the name "Golden West STV of Atlanta," WVEU (channel 69, now CW owned-and-operated station WUPA) in Atlanta, an upstart UHF television station founded by locally based BCG Communications that signed on the air on August 22, 1981, chose instead to begin its subscription television operations on November 23 of that year with the launch of "Superstar TV"—which, incidentally, was more closely aligned in terms of overall branding with the SuperTV services that operated in Washington, D.C. (over WFTY [channel 50, now CW affiliate WDCW]) and Baltimore (over WNUV [channel 54, now a CW affiliate]) at the time—offering college basketball and football games from the Atlantic Coast, Sun Belt and Southeastern Conferences, in addition to theatrical feature films and entertainment specials.[22] Superstar, which provided the vast majority of the programming content broadcast over WVEU (transmitting daily from 1:00 p.m. until its 2:00 a.m. sign-off) as the station worked out interference issues with two-way radio transmissions,[23] ceased operations the morning of July 23, 1983, while its operator, Subscription Television of Greater Atlanta Inc., was in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings.[24] (WVEU soon switched to a music video-focused entertainment format, assuming most of the operations of the MTV-inspired local cable service Atlanta's Video Music Channel.)[25]