Cable television, formerly known as Community Antenna Television or CATV, was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including Arkansas, Oregon and Pennsylvania, to improve poor reception of conventional television signals. Cable antennas were mounted on mountains or other high points, and homes connected to the towers received broadcast signals.
In the late 1950s, cable operators began experimenting with microwave radiation to transmit signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their ability to receive long-distance broadcast signals, operators abandoned local community service and focused on offering consumers a wider variety of programming. In rural Pennsylvania, where there were only three channels (one per network), the number of channels soon more than doubled from the original number as operators began importing programming from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The broader channel selection and clearer reception offered by the service soon attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, some 800 cable systems were in operation, serving 850,000 subscribers.
The exponential growth of cable television was seen as competition from local television stations, and broadcasters called for Federal Communications Commission intervention. In response, the Federal Communications Commission imposed restrictions on cable systems’ ability to import signals from distant stations, which froze the development of cable television in major countries. markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to ease restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched a service that changed the face of the cable television industry: pay-TV . The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee for access to premium cable TV shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation’s first successful pay cable television service. HBO’s use of satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over microwave-distributed services, and other cable TV providers quickly followed suit.
Further deregulation under the 1984 Cable Television Act allowed the industry to expand even further, and by the late 1980s nearly 53 million households were subscribed to cable television (see Section 6.3, Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry.). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by building higher-capacity hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cables. These broadband networks provide multichannel television services, as well as telephone, high-speed Internet, and advanced digital video services over a single wire.