Lesson 9. Cable Television
150 Years of American Telecommunications: The Online Course
Join Section A for FreeRadio and appliance dealers wired the first cable systems in 1948, raising shared antennas to bring television to towns too far from a station to receive a signal. The Communications Act of 1934 recognized two kinds of regulated company, broadcasters and common carriers, and cable fit neither, so the Federal Communications Commission declined to regulate it in 1959. From 1962 the FCC used its microwave licenses to limit the distant stations cable could import, and in June 1968 the Supreme Court upheld that authority, then ruled a week later that cable could retransmit broadcasts without paying the program owners. Satellite delivery from 1975 turned cable into a programming business, and the 1984 Cable Act gave cable its own chapter of the Communications Act, with cities keeping the power to require public, educational and government channels. Federal law took 36 years to decide whether to regulate cable by the wire it used or by the television it sold, and the same choice now decides what streaming services owe.
