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In 1949, broadcast TV was only beginning to reach a large audience, and newspapers were just starting to carry listings of the times when Comedian Milton Berle and Wrestler Gorgeous George would be performing on the tube—just as newspapers and weekly TV magazines are now starting to list cable offerings. Also, though there is much dispute when cable started, 1949 may have been the year of its birth. One version is that Robert J. Tarlton, owner of a radio and TV repair shop in Lansford, Pa., could sell few TV sets because a mountain outside town blocked signals coming in from Philadelphia, 65 miles away.
Tarlton organized viewers into the Panther Valley Television Co., whose members chipped in to build an antenna on the mountain and string cables from it into their homes. Thus a name that cable still goes by: CATV, for Community Antenna Television.
CATV quickly caught on in other communities where reception was poor. Antenna builders soon noticed that if they made the towers tall enough, they could pull in signals from distant as well as nearby stations, thereby offering viewers greater variety as well as clearer pictures. But the road from Panther Valley to national prominence was long blocked by the FCC. Not until the 1970s did two events combine to broaden the cable audience dramatically: the FCC's first steps toward deregulation and, more important, the coming of satellite transmission. Since 1975, cable programmers (Home Box Office, a subsidiary of Time Inc., was the first) have been bouncing signals off an RCA communications satellite, Satcom 1, which hovers 22,300 miles above the equator. That makes it easy for programmers to send signals from a single studio via satellite and earth stations into cable systems all over the country. It also enables cable operators to add sophisticated national programming on pay-cable channels to their once heavily local basic-cable offerings.
Since satellite programming began, the industry has expanded with a rush. As recently as 1974-75, Teleprompter was losing money, and some other cable operators were also in financial trouble; they had borrowed heavily to expand after the FCC loosened regulations but got squeezed by high interest rates. Now the industry is bringing in $1.4 billion in revenue a year and posting profits high enough to catch the eye of multinational giants. General Electric has bought into a cable operator and Getty Oil into a programming company. RCA plans this December to send up another Satcom satellite that will carry more cable programs, even though some of the cable operators might take viewers away from the NBC network, which RCA owns.
What does all this mean to the viewer? Generally, programming of greater diversity and sophistication than can be seen on network TV. What exactly the viewer sees, however, varies with the type of cable service offered in a new subscriber's neighborhood, and also with his or her choice. Essentially, there are two kinds of hookups: