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The regulatory climate is turning more favorable for cable operators too, after many years during which the Federal Communications Commission almost strangled the industry's growth by severely restricting the number of signals that cable operators could transmit. The FCC began to ease up in 1972, and last week it took a long further step: the agency's commissioners voted 6 to 1 in favor of a proposal to allow cable operators to pick up signals from as many distant broadcast-TV stations as they wish. Currently, there is in most cities a limit of two—so that a cable operator in Peoria, Ill., say, may show its viewers programs from stations in Chicago and Milwaukee that it thinks may interest them, but no more. If the FCC's proposal is adopted as a formal rule, the cable operator will be able to add programs from stations in Indianapolis, Sioux City, Iowa, and several other points. Moreover, it will not need to get the consent of, or make any payment to, the broadcaster whose signal it picks up, though the cable operator will have to pay small copyright fees to the owner of the program. Broadcasters are sure to make an angry challenge of this aspect of the proposed FCC ruling in Congress. Quite as important as the effect of the proposed ruling is the shift in FCC philosophy that it indicates. The FCC had always been eager to shield local broadcasters from cable competition. But Philip Verveer, director of the FCC cable bureau, now justifies the proposed new ruling with a rhetorical question: "Why interfere with consumer preference?"
Earlier in April, cable operators were partly freed of an obligation to broadcast shows they did not want to carry. The FCC had long required cable stations to provide "public access" air time to just about any group that put together a show. Though some of the programs perform a real public service (consumer-advice shows, for example), many are excruciatingly dull (talk shows on which people-in-the-street rattle on about nothing in particular) and a few border on pornography (nude dancing on Midnight Blue over Manhattan's Channel J).
The Supreme Court struck down the public-access obligation on a federal level in early April. Local authorities can still compel cable operators to make available public-access air time, and cable companies cannot legally remove the raunchier shows. Still, the Supreme Court ruling gave cable operators somewhat more authority to choose from among programs that they think will actually arouse some interest.
All this growth and change, reports TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin, is symptomatic of a major development in U.S. television: cable is at last taking off. After several false starts, it is poised for the rapid, nationwide expansion that regular television achieved three decades ago. As Russell Karp, president and chief operating officer of Teleprompter Inc., the biggest cable-system operator, told Cronin: "We are at the point now that network TV was at in 1949."
The analogy is both apt and ironic.