Cable television's potential for providing new and attractive types of services will best be realized if the public can be assured of privacy of information transmitted specifically to their terminals and of the right to view any channel without information being gathered as to which channel is being watched at any particular time. It appears that an attractive and relatively inexpensive means of providing both private communications and premium television devices to homes and other potential subscribers would be to include an external unit, located either in a local distribution center or at the input to the subscriber's dropline. This external unit, developed by the MITRE Corporation, would contain a means for remote channel-selection by the subscriber, as well as address-gating and subscriber-response units. (Author/SH)