Cable Television: The Coming Medium

Report Outline
Challenge Posed by Cable Television
A New Medium: Its Origin and Growth
Debate on How to Regulate Cable Tv
Special Focus

Challenge Posed by Cable Television

Television of the Future in the ‘Wired Nation’

Imagine a television' set with 40 working channels. Suppose further that each channel transmits a picture of uniformly high quality, free of “ghosts,” “snow.” and interference from aircraft and electrical appliances. A dozen or more channels offer entertainment programs. Others regularly show meetings of the city council and school board, high school sports, lectures from a nearby university, courses in automobile repair, and language lessons. One channel shows nothing but stock quotations, another displays continuous weather information, while still another focuses on a wire-service news ticker.

And that is not all. By turning to a newspaper channel, the viewer scans the latest headlines and presses a button to order a printout of stories he wants to read. Through a similar hookup by cable—the same cable that brings him this cornucopia of news and entertainment—he sends and receives mail and telegrams, reads his utility bills, orders his groceries and does his banking.

The television set described above is not a figment of a science fiction writer's imagination: it or something very much like it may well become standard equipment in the American home in a decade or so. The technology required for such a complex communications system already exists and has been operative in numerous communities for years. In its present state of development, it is known as community antenna television (CATV). or cable television. CATV differs from conventional telecasting only in that signals are transmitted via a cable rather than through the air. The potential of cable television barely has been scratched. Many experts feel that cable television inevitably will become the country's dominant communications medium and thus make the United States a “wired nation.”