Though said some 200 years ago, this might well be a slogan for executives of fast-growing cable TV and other new video-media companies in which managements are in a never-ending scramble for franchises, funding, and subscribers. In this chapter, the historical and economic relationships among broadcasting, cable, and other new media are explored.

From faint signals

In the late 1940s, while the technological marvel of wireless broadcasting was still in an early phase of development, the first community-antenna television (CATV) systems were already being built in mountainous or rural regions where over-the-air television signals were difficult, if not impossible, to receive. CATV was an eminently logical idea, developed, according to legend, by television set retailers who wanted to sell more sets: With a good antenna atop a nearby mountain and a clear signal as retransmitted by wire (cable), a burgeoning number of new television households could be created.

Yet until the 1960s, with broadcasting expansively dominant, CATV remained a backwater of the video-communications business. Indeed, it took 15 years, from 1948 to 1963, to connect the first million subscribers. Broadcasters' aggressive lobbying against competition from cable was manifest in arcane FCC regulations limiting the number of distant signals that could be imported into large markets and in prohibiting (in 1970) pay cable systems from showing movies less than ten years old and sporting events that had been on commercial television during the previous five years.