The History of Cable and the Future of Television
The history of cable spans fifty years and is filled with inventive entrepreneurs, a combination of government action and inaction, technological advances, lowly start-ups, megamedia giants and lots and lots of money. The World Wide Web is often seen as a foe of cable with its ability to easily transmit online video, yet the Internet’s progression draws heavily in comparison to that of cable’s own development. “History repeats itself,” or so the saying goes, and the same holds true for both the past, present and future of what is known as television—and maybe the webseries medium as well.
In her book Television in the Multichannel Age: A Brief History of Cable Television (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), author Megan Mullen traces the cable industry from its early days of necessity, to its slew of programming options, to the dominating distribution system of today. Modern day cable was known as “community antenna television” (CATV) back in the 1940s, and began life like most industries when a handful of entrepreneurs saw a “need” and designed a product to fill it. Television at the advent of the medium was transmitted over the airwaves with a broadcast signal. The problem was, however, that not every area of the United States was in range of such a signal. The idea thus formulated—separately and simultaneously in various parts of the country—to place a powerful enough antenna in a high enough position to catch the transmissions, then use a cable to bring that signal into a home. From there, businesses emerged as more and more people within these communities wanted to likewise check out the latest craze sweeping the nation, and were willing to pay for the service as well.
These entrepreneurs soon realized that stronger antennas also meant the opportunity of picking up even more channels. Thus what began as filling a very specific “need” soon developed into something entirely different. Residents of a particular city, for instance, may already have a television station with an adequate strength to reach its citizens without cable—but with cable, these residents could access two, three, even five additional channels that they would never be able to receive otherwise. The advent of microwave antennas only increased the number of cable options. Because of the Earth’s curvature, broadcast signals can only travel so far, but by placing a series of antennas at geographical intervals, a signal could be relayed over extensive distances.
“Before long, CATV operators throughout the country began to bring in the signals of popular and well-funded stations from large cities, bypassing less popular smaller station,” Megan Mullen explains in Television in the Multichannel Age. These smaller stations “already felt under siege from the booster and translator stations that had been put up by residents wishing to watch the more popular big-city stations, and they saw CATV, a growing industry with multichannel capacity, as an even bigger threat on their revenues, feeding advertising dollars to the larger imported stations instead of to them.”
Having witnessed the decimation of the music industry via the World Wide Web in the early part of the Twenty First Century—first through the illegal downloading of songs and then with Apple’s iTunes becoming the de facto alternative before the labels could fully react—television networks decided to take matters into their own hands. In 2007, NBC and FOX (later joined by ABC) created a video-viewing website called Hulu in order to control their own destiny. As online viewing increased, however, broadcast advertising dollars began to drop. More significantly, cable system operators like Comcast and Time Warner feared losing subscribers to the free access that the Internet provided.
Local stations who were threatened by the advent of cable had the government to turn to in the 1950s for assistance. Regulations thus soon mandated that service providers include those stations, as well as instituted a delay of fifteen days (later changed to twenty-four hours) on the transmitting of duplicate programming to protect the advertising revenue of the smaller units. The cable operators of today, meanwhile, are big enough and powerful enough to provide their own solutions. Comcast and Time Warner, for instance, soon offered a “Television Everywhere” service where their subscribers could access programming for free on the Internet. With the offer of higher transmission fees, they have also attempted to entice networks to delay the release of new episodes on the likes of Hulu for twenty-four hours—much like the waiting period that the government forced on cable in the 1950s—while making them available to cable subscribers sooner.
The original broadcasting of television signals meant a finite number of stations due to the limited nature of the airwaves, but everything changed with the introduction of communication satellites during the 1970s. “With a single satellite transponder capable of delivering programming to any receiving dish within its footprint, it would be possible for a start-up cable program service to draw a critical mass of viewers from as great an area as an entire continent,” Megan Mullen explains. “Compare this to the complicated system of AT&T landlines, microwave networks, and bicycled videotapes that had been needed for broadcast networks to serve the entire nation via their affiliate station, and for the affiliates in turn to serve their local areas.”
Just as satellites transformed the television landscape in the 1970s, the ability to stream video over broadband connections likewise opened up the World Wide Web. Whereas launching a cable channel is outside the means of the vast majority of Americans, the price tag on filming one’s own narrative videos and putting them on the Internet is relatively cheap. In 2005, a trio of former PayPal employees founded an online entity called YouTube as a way to more easily share such videos, and in essence became the first “channel” on the Web. A growing number of entrepreneurs, meanwhile, created their own websites in order to showcase shorter television-style shows, which became known as webseries. Still other shrewd businessmen—including David Samuels of KoldCast Entertainment and Mike Hudack with blip.tv—formed mini-networks centering exclusively on the webseries medium.
In terms of cable, the first person to take advantage of satellite capabilities was Ted Turner. Turner already operated an independent television station in Atlanta known as TBS and had a steady stream of content thanks to his ownership of both baseball’s Braves and hockey’s Flames. Still, neither of those guaranteed success as the first cable channel. What did, however, was Turner’s belief that Americans loved nostalgia and thus had an appetite for repeats of television shows from a bygone era. As Megan Mullen theorizes in Television in the Multichannel Age, the main catalyst that transformed TBS from potential failure to trailblazing success was Turner’s decision to air episodes of the 1960s sci-fi drama Star Trek against the evening news.
“If the late 1970s saw the shift of cable from a retransmission to a programming medium, the decade that followed set in place the notion that cable could and would become a definitive competitor for broadcast television,” Megan Mullen writes, and the same holds true for the World Wide Web of today. The start-up costs for cable channels at the dawn of the satellite age was daunting but by the time the Twenty First Century arrived, most of that initial investment had been recouped by following the rerun philosophy of Ted Turner. Cable channels were thus in a position to produce original content—not only stealing eyeballs from the networks in the process but Emmy recognition as well. The 2011 nominees for best drama, for instance, included only one full-fledged network series, while almost two-thirds of the acting nominations went to shows on cable.
Having fully established their online personas, the likes of Netflix and Hulu are now also positioning themselves as competitors for not only broadcast television but cable as well. In March 2011, Netflix announced that it had outbid HBO for the production rights of an American adaptation of the BBC drama House of Cards that will star actor Kevin Spacey. Five months later, meanwhile, Hulu announced that it had formed a partnership with Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock to produce a documentary series entitled A Day in the Life, in which filmmakers follow celebrities over the course of twenty-four hours.
Cable providers like Comcast may be able to curtail the ability to watch television without a subscription but that does not mean that quality alternatives will not be available on a different platform in the future, much like cable channels in the 1970s. At least one start-up company, Deluxis Entertainment, announced in 2011 that they will begin producing full-length television shows for their new online network, and the webseries medium has likewise progressed from its initial novelty to a potential source of “must-see” entertainment.
“We can’t trade analog dollars for digital dimes,” former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was often fond of saying in regards to the lower levels of financial compensation for online video distribution. Many believe, however—including Hulu CEO Jason Kilar—that as Internet viewership increases, coupled with a more effective means of linking advertisers with their most coveted target audiences, online revenue could equal and even surpass the levels of traditional television. If this holds true, a new generation of entrepreneurs could potentially transform the World Wide Web into the new “television” and bypass cable in the process.
Just as cable bypassed the airwaves over sixty years ago.
Anthony Letizia (August 15, 2011)
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