Unlike its competitors, it originally allowed subscribers to pay only for programs "selected" during the month, with the first several minutes free (the decoder box included a phone hook-up to transmit information back to the billing office); it later switched to a flat fee.

[6] In 1983, the service went national via satellite; that same year, SelecTV lost WWSG and its 11,000 Philadelphia subscribers when that station switched to airing PRISM, a regional subscription channel that previously was cable-only.

[8] After a year of speculation[9] and failure of the first round of talks,[6] SelecTV acquired ONTV's Los Angeles operations in February 1985 from Oak Industries;[10] some sports events were broadcast on the combined service, which had some 215,000 subscribers.

[14] The Mississippi low-power station dropped the service, having never made a profit,[15] and converted to conventional operation as a community-oriented independent.

[16] Continued erosion of the service's subscriber base led KWHY to start preparing a transition to Spanish-language programming during prime time.

As early as 1981, SelecTV aired more suggestive R-rated movies and softcore versions of pornographic films on its "Adult Theater" programming block.

To enable parental control, the scrambling scheme was slightly different from their regular fare and a key switch on the descrambler unit could lock out decoding of the adult programming.

There were two comedy spin-offs from Channel K, both also airing in 1986, presented in ten-minute segments in order to be used to fill time as needed between movies.

The first was Bachelor Pad, where a self-proclaimed ladies' man gave not-so-helpful tips to single men looking to be more successful at dating women.