Word: earth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just about all the elements seem to be in place for a further growth of cable TV dwarfing anything yet seen. Technology is improving: the cost of an earth station to receive satellite signals is down from $100,000 in 1975 to as little as $12,000 today. Programming is becoming more diverse and imaginative. Indeed, the stage is set for a classic scrap for top industry positions, as befits a business in which technology, creative talent and entrepreneurial leadership open a new market...
...cable programmers (Home Box Office, a subsidiary of Time Inc., was the first) have been bouncing signals off an RCA communications satellite, Satcom 1, which hovers 22,300 miles above the equator. That makes it easy for programmers to send signals from a single studio via satellite and earth stations into cable systems all over the country. It also enables cable operators to add sophisticated national programming on pay-cable channels to their once heavily local basic-cable offerings...
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...
...subscribers. "Before the satellite," he says, "we had to rely on bicycling tapes and film around the country. Suddenly the satellite made possible the idea of buying programming for the entire nation. We could offer new services and look to new sources of income." Teleprompter has invested heavily in earth stations for satellite transmission and now has 80 of them; in January it bought half of Showtime, HBO's rival pay-cable service...
What goes up must come down. The Crimson tennis team which had been up in the clouds during its 8-1 shellacking of Yale nine days ago, came back to earth this weekend during the tightly fought 16-team New Englands in Williamstown, Mass., finishing second behind the Elis by a single point...