SINCE ITS June 1948 invention in Mahanoy City, PA, cable TV (then called community antenna television) has made it into 58.5% of all U.S. households, according to the Pennsylvania Cable & Telecommunications Association.
Salesman John Walson invented the medium when he strung a cable from an antenna at his shop to nearby homes of customers who purchased television sets from him. His motivation was to increase TV sales by improving signal quality, since the poor reception in his valley community made townspeople reluctant to buy televisions.
Today viewers have more options and emerging technologies to choose from in an increasingly competitive market. New offerings from direct broadcast satellite and telephone companies offer viewers alternatives to traditional cable, including interactive television.
Direct broadcast satellite subscriptions grew by 46% in 1997, while new cable TV subscriptions were up 2% last year, says Decker Anstrom, president of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA). In 1997 there were 4.3 million satellite TV subscribers and 65 million cable TV subscribers.
The cable TV industry is investing more than $1 billion annually to convert from analog to higher quality digital signals for interactive television, according to the NCTA. A projected 2.7 million cable TV subscribers will receive digital cable service in 1999.
Uniform standards for cable modems were adopted this year in March by CableLabs, a cable TV research and development consortium. Cable modems for interactive television are installed in 125,000 households in 29 states, mostly in the East and California, NCTA figures reveal. This new cable service provides access not only to television but also to the Internet.
* More than 65 million U.S. households receive basic cable TV service. Cable viewership increased by 2 million households from 1996 to 1997, while broadcast networks lost 839,000 viewers.
* Cable television advertising revenue exceeded $7.8 billion in 1997, including earnings for regional sports advertising. That’s up from $1.1 billion in 1987. Nearly $6 billion was spent on cable TV programming in 1997, representing a 236% increase over the $1.7 billion spent on programming in 1984.
* More women (52%) than men (47%) subscribe to cable TV. The median age of subscribers is 42. More than 23% are college graduates and 58% are married. The median household income of cable TV subscribers is $43,816.
* There are 10,838 cable TV systems in the United States. Nearly 36 million cable subscribers receive 54 or more channels from one of 1,886 cable TV systems, which accounts for 57% of basic cable subscribers. Another 6,374 cable systems provide 30 to 53 channels to more than 24 million subscribers, or 39% of all households with cable TV.
* Families with children are the biggest viewers of cable TV. Nearly 27 million households with cable have children ages 12 to 17. Families with younger children (ages 6 to 11) represent almost 25 million households with cable TV. Fewer than 8 million cable subscribers live in households without children.
* Nearly 78,000 schools get cable TV in classrooms, roughly 75% of all K-12 schools.
* Tele-Communications Inc., with its 15.7 million subscribers, is the nation’s largest multisystem operator of cable TV services. The next largest are, in order: Time Warner Cable, MediaOne, Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc.
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