From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for April 30, 1974:

The idea of the audience for “pay-TV” growing from about 55,000 subscribers to nearly 25 million by 1985 seemed “a pipe dream of magnificent proportions” to people in 1974, even those in the pay-channel business. However, that’s what a private study was predicting for the struggling industry. The report, written by the Stanford Research Institute and commissioned by 24 companies, estimated that pay-TV would be in 30 percent of a projected 83.3 million homes equipped with TV by 1985. Pay-TV subscribers were described as paying extra fees on top of their basic monthly cable cost and then having access to “additional commercial TV channels and a limited amount of noncommercial programming.” There were about eight million conventional cable customers in 1974, by FCC and industry estimates.