Above, the classic pool scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High as seen by late night TV viewers in 1984 who didn't subscribe to ABC's convoluted TeleFirst service involving scrambled broadcast TV, home VCRs, and set-top converter boxes. NSFW. Archived by the Museum of Chicago Classic Television.
From The Video Veteran:
(TeleFirst) Subscribers recorded major Hollywood films (many that were available to the home market for the first time anywhere) on their VCRs in a special scrambled form. Recordings were made in the middle of the night while the normal ABC feed was down and (Chicago's) WLS-TV was off the air.
For a price of about $4.00 (considerably cheaper than a tape rented at the local video store), the viewer could watch a first run movie that was being unscrambled by the matching signal code being transmitted by Telefirst through yet another of a long line of set top converters. The tapes were unplayable through a VCR without the converter and after a few days when the master code would change, unplayable on them as well.
(Thanks, Dustin Hostetler!)
