1. A method of distributing digital data to customer households comprising the steps of: blanket transmitting a plurality of digital data content to customer households in a digital, highly compressed form and with degraded resolution; permitting each customer household to preselect and record desired digital data content in the highly compressed form in which they are transmitted; permitting decoding of digital data that the customer household wishes to view, followed by permitting upconverting, only upon authorized selection for viewing by the customer, the preselected digital data content during display of the digital data content in real time to a resolution at least as high as that of the digital data content before it was degraded; receiving digital data playback information from each customer household to a central controller system; and billing customer households for those recorded digital data that are actually played back for viewing.