A fifth of all viewers—and nearing the real takeoff point
In Boston on most nights through the spring and summer, TV baseball fans can alternate between cheering for their beloved Red Sox on Channel 38 and booing the hated Yankees, playing a different team in a different city, on Channel 11. In New York suburbs, minority audiences or the merely curious can sample Spanish-language interview shows or a Korean variety hour or instruction in yoga. In Castro Valley, Calif., older viewers can tune in a weekly program of panel discussions and entertainment produced by and for senior citizens, sometimes featuring performers in their 80s. And all over the country, movie buffs can see at home such recent films as High Anxiety and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, presented on the tube uncut and uninterrupted by commercials.
Is there such diversity on TV, a medium notorious for the numbing, copycat sameness of so many of its programs? Yes—for those viewers whose sets are hooked up not to antennas that pull TV signals out of the air, but to cables that transmit images and sound over as many as 36 channels in the way that the telephone wires running alongside those cables carry phone calls.
Already cable TV reaches about a fifth of the national television audience: 14.5 million out of roughly 73 million households that have one or more sets. The numbers are growing so rapidly that Young and Rubicam, the ad agency, predicts that almost one of three TV households will be on cable by 1981. Says Vice President William Donnelly: "Thirty percent is the magic number that made regular TV a mass medium and that later made color matter to advertisers." After reaching that point, cable would have a potential for further fast expansion. By industry count, TV cables (made of copper wire wrapped in plastic foam and an outer layer of aluminum) have been strung past just about half of all the TV homes in the U.S. Cable operators could multiply their audience overnight at minimum expense if someone in each of those homes would pick up the phone and order a hookup. Though most viewers ordering cable do so to see late movies or sports events, or simply to get clearer pictures, programmers are putting together ever more innovative packages of shows that cannot be seen on regular TV.