CABLE TV [Film Technology]

Cable TV

[Film Technology]  

     Cable TV began in the 1950s in the United States and Canada as a means of obtaining better reception in remote rural and crowded urban areas, where mountains and high-rise housing might interfere with terrestrial transmission (airwave). Instead of individual TV aerials picking up signals from the nearest relay station, the pictures were fed by coaxial cable directly into receivers, either underground or via poles. The cable provides protection from interference, helping to improve picture quality. Coaxial cables can carry much more signal information than the airwaves, thus solving the problem of spectrum shortage that plagued terrestrial broadcasting. In the United States and increasingly in Europe, cable has meant many more channels being made available to the public—though at an extra cost. A monthly subscription fee has to be paid, in order to activate a device that allows the TV receiver to tune into the cable channels. Firms are keen to introduce more “pay-per-view” systems, so that charges can be made for watching individual events, such as a boxing match, or a new film. In Britain, cable was relatively unimportant until the mid-1990s (when firms were allowed to install cable systems capable of combining TV and telephone services). Instead, the biggest new force in British broadcasting in the early 1990s was satellite TV, in the form of BSkyB, launched by media magnate Rupert Murdoch. Like cable systems elsewhere, this works on a subscription basis. In Asia too, satellite is an important new feature. Small local networks are run by entrepreneurs who invest in a small satellite dish, and who then charge customers for relaying programmes on to them by cable. Programming is mainly provided by Rupert Murdoch’s Hong Kong-based Star TV, which charges high advertising rates for companies to reach the huge audiences these new services attract. industry built around the delivery of television programming to people’s homes by means of a cable system. The term is now usually used to refer to broadband cable systems, constructed from coaxial and fibre-optic cable, carrying more than 30 channels. Most television channels transmitted by cable operators are picked up from satellites, which may also be sending signals direct to people’s homes (DTH, from “direct to home”; sometimes called DBS, “direct broadcasting by satellite”), to be picked up by small individual reception dishes. A DTH-connected home normally receives channels from only one satellite however, whereas cable operators offer channels from several satellites. The digitalization of cable systems that started to take place towards the end of the 1990s and the increased use of fibre-optic cable allow operators to offer pay-per-view services (where viewers pay a fee to watch each programme of their choice), video-on-demand (where programmes from a huge electronic library are on offer), and a wide range of interactive services, such as home banking, home shopping, and distance learning. Cable systems have also begun to offer high-speed access to the Internet and, given the uncertainty over exactly how the television set and the personal computer will converge, are perhaps better placed than rival terrestrial and satellite programme distributors. DTH satellite can offer some of these services, but does not have the capacity, even with digitalization, to offer video-on-demand or some advanced interactive services. It has been argued that as a result, while in rural areas, where it is too expensive to construct cable systems, DTH will be the main means of conveying multichannel and interactive services. In urban areas cable television will win out. In its modern, multichannel form, cable first became established in the 1970s in the United States. By 1998 more than 64 million US homes—two thirds of the country’s homes with television—were subscribing to cable television.

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