The Movie Channel traces its history to the development of Gridtronics, a pay television service which delivered videotaped feature films to cable systems throughout the United States.

The concept was originally developed in the late 1960s by Alfred Stern and Gordon Fuqua, both executives at multiple system operator Television Communications Corporation (TVC) at the time, as part of a multi-channel service that was designed to include channels focusing on the arts, instructional programming and medical programs.

The video-to-cable movie delivery concept was presented by Fuqua and Stern at the 1969 National Cable Television Association Convention.

[4] Warner-Amex executive John A. Schneider served as the company's president; other Warner-Amex staff that manned Star/The Movie Channel's initial management team included executive vice president John Lack, programming chief Robert Pittman, and Fred Seibert, who was in charge of developing on-air promotions.

On January 1, 1980, TMC discontinued its time-lease arrangement with Nickelodeon (then a sister network under the Warner, and later Viacom umbrellas) and became a 24-hour standalone service.

For much of its early years, The Movie Channel struggled in a race for subscribers in a pay television industry that pitted it against as many as seven cable-originated competitors, and even some over-the-air subscription services transmitted over independent stations in many U.S. cities such as ONTV and SelecTV.

In addition to the launch of Cinemax as then-HBO parent Time Inc.'s movie-focused competitor to TMC in August 1980, the competition grew when Warner-Amex and Rainbow Media jointly launched the film and arts-focused Bravo (now a general entertainment basic cable channel, with a reality television focus) in September 1980; Walt Disney Productions threw itself into the fray when it announced plans in early 1982 to launch family-oriented Disney Channel, a service which made its debut in April 1983 (it is now a basic cable channel, focusing mainly on children's programming).

In August 1982, MCA Inc. (then-owner of Universal Pictures), Gulf and Western Industries (then-owner of Paramount Pictures) and Warner Communications reached an agreement to jointly acquire TMC, under which the three companies would acquire a combined controlling 75% interest in the service (with each holding a 25% ownership stake) from Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment.

[6] The proposal was guided by the motive of the studios wanting to increase their revenue share for licensing movie rights to premium television services; there were also concerns by the major studios that HBO's dominance of that market and its pre-buying of pay cable rights to films prior to their theatrical release would result in an undue balance of negotiating power over them by HBO, resulting in a lower than suitable licensing fee rate that would be paid to the distributors for individual titles.

[7][8][9] Subsequently, in late December of that year, the U.S. Department of Justice (which had blocked a similar attempt by MCA, Gulf+Western, 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures to create a competing pay service, Premiere, in an antitrust case ruling less than two years earlier in January 1981) launched a routine preliminary inquiry into the proposed partnership.

However, the deal ran into regulatory hurdles since Warner, Universal and Paramount received 50% of their respective total revenue from film releases and licensing fees from premium services; furthermore, Showtime and TMC combined would control about 30% of the pay cable marketplace, creating an oligopoly with HBO (which, in conjunction with Cinemax, controlled 60% of the market).

[12] The Department's decision – citing concerns, including some expressed by HBO management, that combining the assets of Showtime and TMC would stifle competition in the sale of their programming and that of other pay cable services to cable providers – was despite the fact that, under the original proposal, MCA, Gulf+Western, and Warner had each agreed to continue licensing films released by their respective movie studios to competing pay television networks.

To address the Justice Department's concerns over the deal, the four partners submitted another revised proposal for consideration on July 19, that included guarantees of conduct agreeing that Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. would not receive higher residual licensing payments for films acquired by Showtime and TMC than that paid by other studios, and that all four partners would not permit the two channels in the venture to pay lower fees for films produced by the three studio partners than that paid by smaller pay television services for the same films.

[8][9][14][15] When the deal was completed on September 6, 1983, the operations of The Movie Channel and Showtime were folded into a new holding company, Showtime/The Movie Channel, Inc., which was majority owned by Viacom (controlling 50% of the venture's common stock as well as investing $40 million in cash), with Warner Communications (which owned 31%) and Warner-Amex (which owned the remaining 19% interest) as minority partners[16][17] (the operational arrangement between The Movie Channel and Showtime is of a similar relationship to that between rival pay service Starz and its progenitor Starz Encore; as with Starz Encore to Starz, TMC operates as a secondary service to Showtime even though its launch, under the Star Channel brand, predates that of its parent network – Showtime launched on July 1, 1976 – by three years).

On December 12, 1983, the Times-Mirror Company announced that it would sell the subscriber base and transponder rights assigned to competing premium service Spotlight to Showtime-The Movie Channel, Inc. for an undisclosed price.

[18] On August 10, 1985, after Time Inc. and cable provider Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) jointly submitted a bid to buy the company for $900 million and the assumption of $500 million in debt as well as an earlier offer by American Express the previous month to buy out Warner's share of the company (under a clause in the agreement that allowed either company the option of buying out their partner's stake in Warner-Amex), Warner Communications exercised an option to acquire American Express' 50% share of Warner-Amex Cable Communications for $450 million.

This gave Viacom exclusive ownership of both premium channels through its $500 million cash payment and acquisition of 1.625 million shares for Warner's 31% stake in Showtime/The Movie Channel, and Warner-Amex's 19% interest in the unit and its 60% interest in MTV Networks (Viacom had owned Showtime alone or jointly with other companies – previously in ventures with TelePrompTer Corporation, and later briefly, its successor Group W Cable – from the time it launched in July 1976).

Although extended promotional breaks were shown in a somewhat limited form beforehand, partially as a result of the changes that occurred in 1988, breaks between individual feature presentations on the channel sometimes ran as long as 20 minutes, and even up to 25 minutes in rare cases, depending on the scheduled airtime of the next film (which was denoted on a minute-based countdown ticker graphic that persisted within breaks from May 1988 to August 1997; Showtime would implement a similar countdown graphic for the next scheduled program as part of a branding update in January 1990, which that network would discontinue following its August 1997 rebrand).

The Movie Channel temporarily truncated the length of its promotional breaks to five minutes or less in an on-air strategical test during February and March 1993, dispensing of fixed start times at the top and bottom of the hour – at which most of TMC's weekday daytime film telecasts had been scheduled, along with some films aired in other dayparts, since the 1988 format revamp – in favor of airtimes set at top-of-the-hour, bottom-of-the-hour and random five-minute intervals regardless of daypart.

[32] The break limits imposed by the channel resulted in TMC reducing the number of internally produced interstitial segments that it aired during promotional breaks, with interstitials airing over the next four years consisting mainly of trailers and shorter-length behind-the-scenes segments for upcoming and current films produced by their originating studios.

On March 1, 1994, The Movie Channel and Showtime in conjunction with rivals HBO and Cinemax implemented a cooperative content advisory system to provide to parents specific information about pay-cable programming content that may be unsuitable for their children; the development of the system—inspired by the advisory ratings featured in program guides distributed by the major premium cable services—was in response to concerns from parents and advocacy groups about violent content on television, allowing Showtime Networks and other premium services discretionary authority to assign individual ratings corresponding to the objectionable content depicted in specific programs (and categorized based on violence, profanity, sexuality or miscellaneous mature material).

[36] Representatives for the affected TCI systems said that the decision to remove The Movie Channel from their lineups was made at the local level and was not a directive by company management.

The individual coastal feeds of each channel are usually packaged together, resulting in the difference in local airtimes for a particular movie telecast between two geographic locations being three hours at most.

Prior to the advent of digital cable, many providers often sold The Movie Channel separately from Showtime, continuing for about two decades after Viacom acquired both Warner Communications and Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment's respective ownership interests of the two previously autonomous services in 1985.

Programs that aired under the Showtime After Hours banner carried either a TV-MA or R rating (usually the former), primarily for strong sexual content and nudity.

The block had often been the subject of both scrutiny in the media and a source of humor in popular culture, with references to Showtime's late night programming being featured in various films and television shows.

In 1981, the text for the network's name changed from the Broadway typeface to a stylized all-uppercase font (with a slightly enlarged letter "M") augmented to the left and underside of the star.

The channel ran different and unique feature presentation opens and network IDs during the nine-year period it was in use (among which included intros in which the logo changed facial expressions at the draw of a curtain, set to a bouncy keyboard tune;[65] a grayscale version of the logo – which then winked – rotating to face the screen in front of a gray background accompanied by a steady drumbeat;[65] and a live-action/partially computer-animated sequence set to Indiana Jones-style adventure music in which the logo shoots lasers from its eyes to escape from the newspaper it is printed on – which is set afire as kindling in a fireplace – and embarks on a calamity-filled journey through a family's living room, seen from its point of view, as it heads toward the safety of a TV set it rappels into on a cable hooked up to a wall outlet above the fireplace's mantle).