1.) “Unlike recording, radio and broadcast television, cable television’s earliest technical breakthroughs came from a fairly anonymous and practical group of people.”
The advent of cable stemmed from a problem facing appliance store owners whose customers lived in either remote or hard-to-reach via broadcast signal areas. In order to increase their sales they began to build antenna towers that would enable their customers to pick up the signals from their television sets. They then strung cables from those towers into the customers’ homes. This created a new market.
2.) “By the early 1970s, particularly with the advent of communication satellites, it was clear that cable’s growth could no longer be limited to small, isolated communities. With cable’s capacity for more channels and better reception, the FCC began to seriously examine industry issues.”
The first measure taken by the FCC, as discussed in the textbook, was to reaffirm must-carry rules. This meant that all cable operators were required to assign channels to carry local broadcasts. The point of this was to make sure that smaller, local channels had the chance to benefit from cable. The FCC also took steps to make sure that cable channels carried programs dedicated to education, government and other public issues.
3.) “The second basic cable service to dramatically change the world’s cultural landscape was MTV.”
MTV was started by Warner Communications in 1981 and purchased by Viacom four years later. Today MTV has stations around the world and boasts hundreds of millions of viewers. Just as our culture and values have changed throughout the years, so has MTV. One of the ways that the book demonstrates this idea is by discussing the fact that MTV, in its early years, provided little airtime for black musicians. Today MTV’s music lineups feature musicians of all ethnicities.
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