Cable News

Origins

Several factors converged in the mid-1970s to lay the groundwork for the creation of cable networks. The technological basis came first—geostationery orbit communication satellites were well proven by the mid-1970s. By orbiting a satellite about 22,300 miles above Earth, the “bird” would appear to stay in the same place day and night. It could operate like a super-high antenna, and cover a third of the globe. Three of them in the right orbits could theoretically blanket Earth with signals. Given sufficient receiving antenna dishes at local cable systems, a signal sent (“uplinked”) to such satellites could be transmitted (“downlinked”) around the country, forming an instant network. The question was how to fund all those initial TVRO (TV receive-only) antenna installations to make a viable national network possible.

About a quarter of the country's homes were being served by cable by 1975—many more were “passed” by feeder lines but had not yet subscribed. In just five more years, however, cable penetration reached half the households, a proportion that very slowly rose to something around 70 percent by the 1990s. Here was a vast potential audience for more than simply the local market television signals plus a few distant signals that most cable systems then provided. By the early 1980s, half the cable subscribers were being served by the top ten multiple system operators, creating substantial empires with money to invest in new programming lures to attract more subscribers.

Finally, regulation no longer blocked cable's widespread use of satellite signals. The Federal Communications Commission, after years of trying to protect television broadcasters, had by the late 1970s begun to deregulate cable (or, in some instances, not regulate it in the first place), relying instead on intermedia competition rather than regulation to meet public interest concerns about prices and services. The cable market would no longer be defined or constrained by governmental policies.

The first service to make the jump to using a satellite distribution system was the Home Box Office (HBO) subscription channel owned by Time Inc. HBO announced in 1975 plans to nationally distribute by satellite what had been a regional [Page 236]service. In Atlanta, television station owner Ted Turner made public his plans to do the same thing—thus making his local UHF station (restyled as WTBS) a “superstation” offering movies and sports programming for use by cable systems across the country. To get these new networks underway, both HBO and Turner announced plans to assist cable systems in buying and installing the needed TVRO antennas so they could link to the promised services, both of which were available by late 1976. Other independent (non-network affiliate) television stations in Chicago and New York followed Turner's initiative, creating further superstations. Soon the Showtime subscription service began to compete with HBO. By 1979, C-SPAN, the first ESPN sports channel, the Learning Channel, and Nickelodeon (targeted for children) had all begun operation. Taken together, these services were the pioneers of cable networking. Their examples prompted a flood of additional cable channels in coming years. Many focused on some form of journalism.

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