Word: broadcasting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Earlier in April, cable operators were partly freed of an obligation to broadcast shows they did not want to carry. The FCC had long required cable stations to provide "public access" air time to just about any group that put together a show. Though some of the programs perform a real public service (consumer-advice shows, for example), many are excruciatingly dull (talk shows on which people-in-the-street rattle on about nothing in particular) and a few border on pornography (nude dancing on Midnight Blue over Manhattan's Channel...
...broadcast TV was only beginning to reach a large audience, and newspapers were just starting to carry listings of the times when Comedian Milton Berle and Wrestler Gorgeous George would be performing on the tube-just as newspapers and weekly TV magazines are now starting to list cable offerings. Also, though there is much dispute when cable started, 1949 may have been the year of its birth. One version is that Robert J. Tarlton, owner of a radio and TV repair shop in Lansford, Pa., could sell few TV sets because a mountain outside town blocked signals coming in from...
...channels featuring the offerings of stations whose signals are too weak to be picked up ordinarily by antenna. These programs make up a bewildering smorgasbord: sports events (Madison Square Garden, for example, offers to basic cable many basketball and hockey games and boxing matches not shown on broadcast TV), educational, and religious shows. All channels viewable on basic cable can carry advertising...
Another source of programming for basic cable is the superstations-independent broadcast-TV stations that also lease space on Satcom, whose signals bounce to the earth stations of cable systems all over the country. At present there are four: WTCG in Atlanta, WOR in New York, WON in Chicago and KTVU in the San Francisco-Oakland area. They and their cable customers should benefit especially from the FCC'S proposal last week that cable operators be permitted to pick up as many signals as they like from anywhere, and a companion proposal that cable companies be permitted...
...superstations' offerings to cable now consist largely of sports events and reruns of once popular network shows. But Ted Turner, the flamboyant yachtsman and owner of WTCG, promised last week to introduce some more appealing programs: original children's shows, reruns of highly rated public-broadcasting programs (e.g., The Ascent of Man) that may not have been seen in some areas that cable now reaches. Superstations, however, are running into furious opposition from conventional broadcasters and their allies in the sports and entertainment worlds. MCA-Universal and Paramount are balking at selling any of their TV shows...