American culture

Cable television

Cable television in the United States started as a Community Antenna Television (CATV), a retransmission of the over-the-air local stations' programs through cable. One of the earliest services was by a retailer Robert J. Tarlinton of Lansford, Pennsylvania in order to boost the sales of TV receivers. The primary subscribers to the service were the households which could not receive a clear signal due to interference from a nearby mountain.

Like the television industry, cable television industry is consisted of two parts. Cable systems are local entities that own the physical cable connecting to the individual households. Cable systems usually have to obtain franchise (permission to operate their business) from local government.

They may pay part of their profit to the government, or offer a part of their channels for public, educational and governmental (PEG) use. Such channel would carry town meeting, theater performance by a local school, and/or programs produced by a local resident. Unlike television stations, cable systems are mostly local monopolies.

Multiple systems operators are often owned by the same company, (called MSO, multiple system operator). The best known MSOs include Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cox. Cable operators were the target of mergers and acquisitions from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s, because of the expectation that it is one of the two major high-speed Internet infrastructures connecting the backbone to individual households, or "the last mile."

The other last mile infrastructure was the local telephone networks. TCI and MediaOne were purchased by AT&T, which then sold its cable division to Comcast. Time Warner Cable, part of Time Warner, was purchased by AOL.

Retransmission of the local programs is regulated by so-called must-carry rule. According to the rule, cable systems are obligated to carry all the local stations that ask for the carriage—except for those stations that request payment in exchange for the retransmission.

Programs cable systems carry mostly come from cable networks, national or global entities distributing contents via satellite to local cable systems. Well known cable networks include BBC America, C-SPAN, CNN, Discovery Channel, ESPN, Fox News, MSNBC, MTV, SciFi Channel, TLC, and TNT.

There are also "premium" cable networks such as HBO which typically carry unedited movies and do not display advertisements. Premium networks typically are added as an additional charge to "basic" service.

Basic cable service typically includes retransmission of local television stations' programs, as well as some cable networks.

Movies and sporting events are often offered as pay-per-view.

Revenues of the cable systems come from two sources—subscription and local advertisements. Subscription fees are divided among the cable systems and cable networks. The revenue from pay-per-view programs are handled much the same way. Cable networks' revenue are from subscription fees and national advertisements.