Thomas F. O'Neil (1915–1998) was the chairman of RKO General studios who brought movies to television and experimented with an early coin-operated pay-TV system.
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.
[3] It was his television stations' need for programming that led O'Neil to start buying the broadcast rights to movies.
According to legend, O'Neil haggled with Hughes in taxicabs while driving around Central Park, on cross-country flights flown by Hughes and in Las Vegas until in 1954 the duo signed a contract in the men's room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, turning RKO Pictures over to General Teleradio for $25 million, or about $150 million at today's prices.
[4] The studio library's hundreds of titles solved O'Neil's movie programming problems, and he began diversifying his company into regional airlines as well as resort hotels and Pepsi-Cola bottling franchises.