Cable Television

In the United States, cable television refers to both a category of televised entertainment and information programming and the technological means of delivering that programming. In existence for over a half century, cable television has gone through a number of transformations—with regard to its uses, content, industry structure, and regulatory framework. Cable, at first known as community antenna television or CATV, was begun in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a means of redistributing broadcast television signals to small towns that were either too far from the stations originating those signals to receive them over the air, using set-top or even rooftop antennas, or were blocked from receiving the signals by mountains or other obstructions. Local entrepreneurs built very tall receiving towers and relayed the signals gathered there to local “subscribers” via wire for a monthly fee. It was not long before the CATV entrepreneurs came together to form a trade association and to share innovations and know-how. In the decades since, the cable industry (as it became known in the late 1960s) has faced a shifting and uncertain government policy climate. At first, cable was perceived as a threat to the broadcast television industry, both because of its ability to bypass nearby signals to retransmit the signals of better funded stations from larger markets and because some broadcasters claimed that cable systems were unfairly making money from programming that they themselves had paid for the rights to air. By the early 1970s, most of these concerns had abated, and by that point some very utopian expectations had instead been placed on the cable industry—nothing short of making up for the perceived public service failures of the commercial broadcast television system. This was known as the “blue sky” era. What actually emerged, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, were a number of satellite-delivered cable programming networks. These have not exactly addressed the utopian dreams of blue sky. However they eventually came to represent a range of programming niches that generally adhere to established broadcast program genres, which is not surprising given that they generally follow the same commercial imperatives as broadcast television. What is now known as cable television has the appeal to reach many more US households than it once did, even while still serving its initial retransmission function. These days cable itself competes with some very similar multichannel delivery technologies, including direct broadcast satellite, IPTV (high-speed Internet), and others. While these technologies, including cable itself, now are available globally, their existence is due to a range of political, economic, and cultural circumstances—most differing from those that allowed cable television to develop as it did in the United States (and in a somewhat different way in Canada).