Thomas F. O'Neil

Who was Thomas F. O'Neil?

Thomas F. O'Neil was the former chairman of RKO General studios who brought movies to television and experimented with an early coin-operated pay-TV system.

O'Neil's career began with the General Tire and Rubber Company, which his father William F. O'Neil had founded. O'Neil was running the tire company's Boston office when he visited the offices of the Yankee Network, a radio network the company had invested in to regain radio advertising costs.

O'Neil was back from the war in the Pacific when he formed General Teleradio in 1948 by combining the Yankee Network with a station operating in a new medium: WNAC-TV's first telecasts went to exactly two small-screen television sets placed in the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston.

It was his television stations' need for programming that led O'Neil to start buying the broadcast rights to movies. Some Hollywood studios boycotted the venture for fear that giving away movies on television free would undermine their theater business, and O'Neil had to scramble to find titles, once paying the Bank of America $1.3 million for 30 titles in 1953.