CABLE TV'S MISSED CONNECTION

...Yesterday's godsend, Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote, "has a way of becoming today's disappointment...

...Still, a recent report issued by the National Science Foundation estimated that 40 per cent of American households will have access to two-way videotex by the end of the century...

...Throughout the 1970s, the technology was heralded as a "cable revolution" that would change society—or at least the face of the television medium— and yield huge profits in the process...

...television is to get a network contract, do little or nothing to build up local programming, and confine one's efforts to making regular trips to the bank...

...If videotex follows the route blazed by entertainment cable, it will first appeal to young, salaried professionals, but will eventually attract enough advertising to reduce direct subscription costs...

...The fee is refundable when a member quits the co-op...

...The Commission further stipulated that operators had to make studio facilities available so that citizens could produce programs for these channels...

...Locally generated programming will be accorded a higher priority than in privately run systems: More than a dozen channels have been reserved for use by municipal government and community organizations, and 8 per cent of the systern's annual revenue will be churned back into local programming...

...When cable turns into a necessity in some future information age, however, monopolistic control of the medium will be a critical issue...

...Technology opens doors and oligopoly marches just behind closing them," Todd Gitlin has noted...

...The system could be used as a fire and burglar alarm...

...Neither the courts nor the FCC have put a stop to mergers and buyouts of this kind...

...Its organizers say the co-op will offer two tiers of service...

...For most of cable's history, the FCC has been content to protect the interests of broadcasters...

...Cable magnates believe the market for two-way cable is just beginning to stir...

...And media seers, encouraged by industry boosters, promised that consumers would eventually be able to use cable systems for banking, shopping, home security, and even voting...

...Barber called interactive technology "a potentially powerful ally of democracy," and added: "Spectator society imposes passivity, but the interactive capabilities of the new technology can encourage participation and civility...

...The cost of programming has been rising, subscribers have not signed up as fast as expected, advertisers have been hesitant to sink too much money into the medium, and the wiring of cities has been slow...

...The Davis system will be managed initially by a Washington-based cable firm, which will attempt to secure partners and half the money needed to build the system...

...Today, cable is just a way of spending one's evening, no different from watching the old network shows...

...So with the help of the Jerrold Electronics Corporation, owned by later-to-be governor Milton Shapp, Tarlton planted an eighty-five-foot tower and three antennas on the mountain, amplified Philadelphia's faint waves, and fed them down to Lansford through a coaxial cable...

...VIEWS REVIEWS CABLE'S MISSED CONNECTION A revolution that won't be televised BY ROSS CORSON Last November, meeting in the shadow of Disney's Magic Kingdom in Anaheim, California, cable television executives learned that To-morrowland may not be as appealing as it once was on Main Street U.S.A...

...Compliance with the rule is easy, thanks to technological leaps in the field of fiber optics...

...page of The New York Times that two-way cable "offers the technological means to a more united, active, communicative citizenry...

...A recent study by a Syracuse University researcher documented cable's failure to bring about significant change in the lives of Americans...

...Cable companies would be service agencies—a far cry from their current status as entertainment providers...

...And they said that unless the FCC defines cable as a common carrier—like the telephone system—and regulates it accordingly, it cannot interfere with cable content...

...The user could tap into the system to read the newspaper, receive mail, shop, read video books from the library, monitor home energy use, and manage finances...

...Depending on who takes control of the two-way potential, cable could be used to enhance the lives of Americans—or at least of those who will be able to afford it—or it could be just another device to hawk more products...

...Speakers at the Western Cable Television Show repeatedly warned against continued residence in the fantasy lands of technological hype and exaggerated promises...

...Entertainment offerings on cable are often barely distinguishable from the network fare, and the non-entertainment potential of the technology has yet to be exploited...

...Larry Grossman, president of the Public Broadcasting System, has observed that "the greater success cable has in the future, the greater the commercial pressures will be to produce the lowest-common-denominator programming to attract bigger, more sellable audiences...

...The cable networks generally offer reworked versions of long overworked broadcast programming—movies, sports, talk shows, news...

...Such flickering views of cable television's prospects are a relatively new development...

...Tony Schwartz of The New York Times recently explained, "The cable networks that seem least imperiled by short-term problems are those that appeal to a large but clearly defined audience and have also found ways to keep costs down...

...Most small towns were cabled in the 1950s and 1960s during the drive to overcome poor television reception and import broadcast signals...

...Each time a user taps into the cable system, a cable company computer will make note of the action...

...Fierce franchise fights are raging in large cities that have not yet been wired...

...The poor may simply be priced out...

...From the humble beginnings of the Panther Valley Television Company and similar CATV ventures has grown a multibil-lion dollar industry...

...Without FCC interference, those original cable systems have passed into the hands of large companies, but because of early Commission restrictions in the top 100 television markets, the metropolitan areas have only recently been opened to the conglomerates...

...The Co-op Board, not the management company or its partners, will run the operation until then...

...Cable Sports Faces Big Decline...

...And the remaining bidders have been forced to make grandiose promises to win franchise contests: The name of the game is to get a lock on the territory and worry later about the details...

...Even local programming, where available, is usually uninspiring...

...As author Todd Gitlin has observed, the proliferation of channels represents "a few more brand names in the supermarket...

...Two-way cable could open homes to intelligence agencies, police, credit companies, or anyone else who could persuade a cable company to release customer information...

...According to Elshtain, "A true democratic policy involves a deliberative process, participation with other citizens, a sense of moral responsibility for one's society, and the enhancement of individual possibilities through action in, and for, the res publica...

...The big companies are, indeed, doing well already, but surprisingly, many cable concerns are facing hard times...

...Cut-throat competition and stiff conditions for enfranchisement have compelled all but the largest companies to drop out of the bidding...

...Far from changing American culture or lifestyles, cable stands revealed as just another luxury good, a high-tech boob tube...

...The FCC has left regulation of cable franchises almost entirely to local governments, an arrangement preferred by the industry, which assumes local governments are less informed and weaker than the Federal bureaucracy...

...The co-op, she says, will keep profits from the cable system in Davis, and programming decisions will inevitably reflect local tastes: "You just vote the folks [on the Co-op Board] out if you don't like the decisions they're making...

...Efforts to develop high-quality programming that might reach a limited audience are punished in the marketplace...

...One cable executive, quoted in The Village Voice, concluded from the experience that "culture just doesn't sell in this country...

...Supreme Court dashed the FCC's limited attempt to regulate cable programming...

...It will then appeal to middle-class consumers...

...The broadcasters balked and pressed the FCC to restrict signal importation...

...According to FCC rules, cable systems with more than 3,500 subscribers must have the capacity to carry at least twenty channels and be geared for two-way interaction by 1986...

...the current FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, says he wants to go further and "unregulate...

...For the most part, however, cable systems in the 1980s operate free of significant Federal interference: The FCC has not limited vertical integration—cable equipment manufacturers and program producers can own franchises—and it has not restricted multiple ownership of cable systems...

...Yet, while the home might be transTest Pattern in Davis If all goes as planned, Davis, California, will boast the nation's first cable television cooperative...

...Cable has been making headlines for reasons other than its futuristic possibilities...

...There are movies on HBO, children's programs on Nickelodeon, rock music performances on Warner-Amex's Music Television, and news on CNN...

...If laws are not passed to regulate the companies' use of information, consumers will have to entrust their privacy to corporate good will...

...Hardly a revolution...

...The study concluded that cable subscribers do not watch television any more than those with only broadcast-equipped sets, do not watch more selectively, and do not watch with more enthusiasm...

...This convergence of cable and broadcast has all but eliminated the possibility of seeing diverse, alternative programming on cable television...

...Political and community gatherings will be less attractive because polling will lull many into a false sense of participation...

...According to Judy Corbett, president of the Davis Cable Co-op Board, the cooperative will provide better service to the community than a commercial operator...

...Available to about five million homes through 430 cable systems (which got the programming free), CBS Cable apparently drew an audience too small to appeal to major advertisers...

...Last April, Rutgers University political scientist Benjamin Barber suggested on the Op...

...Cable channels do stake out their own turf, but they specialize only in different kinds of mass-audience programming...

...More likely than not, cable will make people content to stay at home and transmit opinions to bureaucrats...

...Only such mammoths as Warner-Amex (a joint operation of Warner Communications and American Express), Group W (a subsidiary of Westinghouse), and Time, Inc.'s American Television & Communications could make extravagant promises and expect to be believed...

...Cable-TV Viewing Study Dims Prospects of Large Increase in Number of Channels, and Pay Cable TV Is Losing Some of Its Sizzle as Viewer Resistance, Disconnects Rise...

...They also portray politics as a simple matter of choosing from easily quantified choices, A, B, or C—with the choices predetermined by the cable programmers...

...Knight-Ridder, Dow Jones, and Time, Inc., are experimenting with some form of videotex services...

...Cable TV not so long ago was going to be the miracle that rescued us from television...

...Tarlton was in the business of selling and repairing radios, and he wanted to add a new product to his shelves—the television set...

...it just isn't profitable to string wire across vast areas, though rural citizens could perhaps derive the greatest benefit from the convenience of two-way electronic consumer services...

...She has written for Sacramento Magazine and In These Times...

...the services cost too much for most individual consumers...

...Eventually, we all may be looking for something to deliver us from cable TV...

...The company expects a loss of $30 million...

...Since 1977, when Warner-Amex set up its two-way Qube system in a section of Columbus, Ohio, the interactive possibiliInstant cable referendum turn politics into another consumer product, something like choosing breakfast food ties of cable have been popularized in newspaper and magazine science-fiction-like stories...

...Being a citizen in a democracy requires more than merely registering one's opinion," she wrote...

...Virtually every channel offered as part of a basic subscription package runs commercials, and even some "premium" channels, for which subscribers must pay extra, have started to carry ads (for their money, pay television subscribers are getting "fluff," according to New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor—"and not very good fluff, at that...

...Those promises—those threats—are worth watching even if the cable programs are not...

...To join the system, a Davis resident must pay $200—all at once or in installments...

...In the absence of significant changes behind the television screen, today's promises of cable-inspired social transformation could portend a more stifling way of life...

...Although the town was courted by several private cable companies that hoped to win the Davis franchise, the city council voted last December to set up a municipal co-op...

...Indeed, the instant polling of television viewers may subvert democratic tenets...

...formed into a fishbowl, the lives of its inhabitants might be privatized by the new technology...

...For example, Time, Inc., is the second-largest owner of cable systems in the United States, as well as owner of HBO, the most popular pay-television channel on cable...

...In anticipation of the day when videotex is widespread, publishers are snapping up cable systems...

...In its relatively short existence, the cable industry has disproved what it set out to prove—that technological change alone can bring meaningful change to our lives...

...Future television sets could be fitted with keyboards and microprocessors and hooked up to a central cable company computer...

...The survivors, then, will stick to the same formula used by network television for thirty years: low programming costs and mass audiences...

...These transactions are going to be recorded, and there's no guarantee the records will be used only for billing," notes Mosco...

...The researcher observed that disenchantment sets in among cable viewers as "they find that the reality is not as great as the perceived promise...

...CATV offered no original programming, and most broadcasters looked upon it favorably as a way of reaching more people and boosting advertising revenues...

...CATV systems in the 1950s were usually small, locally owned enterprises that delivered three or four channels from the nearest television stations...

...In 1972, for example, after heavy lobbying from public-interest groups, the Commission required cable operators with more than 3,500 subscribers to provide four access channels—one for the public to use free on a first-come, first-served basis...

...But in 1979, the U.S...

...For the same commercial reasons, cable operators prefer programs that reach the largest number of people, programs that command the most advertising dollars...

...The competition for the metropolitan franchises should not obscure the conglomeration and integration of the cable industry...

...Thurman White, a consultant to the California State Assembly Subcommittee on Cable Television, thinks the Davis effort will serve as a testing ground, and perhaps a model, for future cable co-ops...

...Although Tarlton was not the first to establish a "community antenna television" (CATV) system, he was the first to seek and receive national prominence for doing so...

...But it will never accommodate deep and meaningful debate and discussion among all citizens...

...After a year of operation, CBS gave up on its cable venture...

...It issued comprehensive rules in 1972, but all were altered or eliminated in the following decade...

...Several media companies already offer databank services to businesses that have computers...

...In less than a year, cable subscribers in Davis will control their own technology...

...Many urban residents will discover in the coming years that their cable company cannot meet the terms of its franchise agreement...

...On many cable programs," The Wall Street Journal recently noted, "the 'talking head'—a performer on a couch, at a desk, in front of a kitchen counter—is standard fare, reminiscent of 1950s television...

...It continues to prohibit telephone companies from owning cable systems, and it forbids television stations to buy cable systems in their own market area...

...Systems equipped for twenty channels before 1980 are exempt from the two-way requirements...

...Videotex, the delivery of information by cable to television sets—or by telephone to home computers—has attracted the most attention...

...The technology itself gave cause for optimism: Wires capable of carrying a hundred or more television channels would Ross Corson, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, wrote "Computer Revolution" in the September 1982 issue...

...Cable executives would see the change in status as an infringement of their First Amendment rights: They contend cable companies are more like publishing firms than utilities...

...Former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson said in 1967 that "technological change can bring change in structure, but it is as likely to change to even greater concentration as to wider diversity...

...In such an unfettered climate, they will presumably pile up the huge profits predicted not long ago...

...Industry analysts say many big-city franchises have been won by companies that "overprom-ised...

...one for local government, and one for leased use...

...The entrepreneur charged $100 to connect a television set to the cable, and he billed customers $3 a month in service fees...

...Melinda Welsh (Melinda Welsh is a free-lance writer in Davis...

...Industry observers expect cable companies to rake in more than $21 billion in subscription revenues by 1990...

...But Davis will be the first to go co-op—a move in tune with the progressive climate of the university town...

...f there is any hope for cable, it will not be in the area of entertainment programming, where cable converges with broadcasting more than it diverges from it, but in its potential for two-way interaction...

...Smith hoped cable might make a difference, but the cable industry has cashed in on the old broadcast success formula: Only about half of the cable systems in the United States offer locally produced programming...

...Similar sober messages were sounded at the November Cable Programming Conference in Los Angeles, and in recent press reports bearing such heads as: Many Cable Services Facing Trouble as Ap.Sales Fall Below Expectations...

...The rise of cable networks has been encouraged by the fact that many of these networks own and run cable systems in cities across the country...

...And yet it is doing its utmost to be spared having to provide outlets for free speech— and doing so shamelessly in the name of the First Amendment...

...Elshtain concluded that "the ersatz participation characteristic of interactive television is dramatically at odds with this democratic ideal...

...A hair-thin glass fiber can now transmit at least five times as many signals as a thick bundle of copper wires...

...His venture inspired other electronic tin-kerers to carry television signals to America's hinterlands...

...Today, cable television reaches some twenty-nine million households—more than one-third of all television homes in the United States...

...Politics is transformed into just another consumer good: "Picking Crunchy Creatures over Funny Flakes for breakfast becomes a choice comparable to supporting or opposing a local school bond issue," Elshtain wrote...

...CATV is now known as "cable communications," and the small but extremely profitable local enterprises have been overwhelmed by such corporate giants as Time, Inc., Warner Communications, Westinghouse, and Cox Communications...

...This trap was highlighted late in 1982 by the failure of CBS Cable, an ambitious attempt to offer the cable-viewing public arts and "high" culture...

...Instead of contracting with broadcast networks, cable operators sign up with one or more of the national cable programmers—Time, Inc.'s Home Box Office (HBO), Ted Turner's Cable News Network (CNN), the USA Network, Viacom Inc.'s Showtime, or the Entertainment & Sports Programming Network (ESPN...

...Experiments have demonstrated that instant opinion polls will one day be possible...

...Common carrier status could be a partial treatment for the paucity of diversity on cable, because operators would be unable to give preference to programs produced by their parent companies...

...After ten years of operation, the system will presumably have paid itself off...

...subscribers can receive thirty-five channels for $7.95 a month or fifty-four channels—including Home Box Office and Showtime—for $10.95 a month...

...The survivors of cable's shakeout will stick to the networks9 old formula: cheap programs for mass audiences The question of cable's status seems academic today because operators do little more than provide entertainment...

...one for local education...

...But the glowing promises of cable's partisans have not been realized...

...Federal and state regulators may be playing catch-up ball in the coming years, fighting a well-entrenched industry...

...Cable has added quantity—some homes receive two dozen or more channels—but it has not beautified the cultural landscape with diverse or high-quality programming...

...It enables cable to cater to many tastes and interests, to take the "mass" out of mass communications...

...High-tech heaven has been sullied by earthly problems—problems that will continue to weed out the small companies until most are gone...

...Other kinds of co-ops are flourishing in Davis, and the city council has a liberal reputation...

...The networks, prohibited from owning local cable franchises, have formed cable programming concerns...

...Indeed, about one-third of the nation's cable systems are now owned by broadcasting companies...

...Former co-op manager Jon Schecter says those rates will remain the same in the next few years, while commercial rates will steadily rise...

...But Qube and cable's two-way potential remain, for the most part, objects of curiosity...

...HBO and Time's smaller pay channel, Cinemax, are transmitted by satellite to local cable systems for distribution to homes—similar to what the broadcast networks have been doing for more than a generation, except that it is becoming more lucrative...

...Advertising is becoming an essential component of cable's fortunes...

...And tomorrow's blight...

...In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the FCC expanded the scope of its cable regulations...

...Robert Tarlton had modest aspirations in 1950 when he set up the Panther Valley Television Com-,pany in tiny Lansford, Pennsylvania...

...As a result of deregulation, broadcasting interests are rapidly moving into cable...

...For now, the cable systems will be left to their own devices...

...Work and shopping would increasingly be accomplished through the television set, leading some observers to predict that "electronic hermits" will live in the "electronic cottage" age...

...Until the fall of 1982, Westinghouse owned half of Showtime, the second most popular pay channel...

...However, cable appears to be taking its cue more from the radio business than from publishing...

...augment the limited broadcast space available on the electromagnetic spectrum, giving television viewers an attractive alternative to network drivel...

...Were the Government to change the status of cable, operators would have to allocate channel time on a nondiscriminatory basis to anyone who would pay a fee set by state regulatory commissions...

...University of Massachusetts political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain disagreed with Barber, however, and charged in The Nation that interactive cable does not have the potential to democratize society...

...Instant referendums encourage the tyranny of the majority, and they eliminate extensive public discussion...

...The widespread use of two-way cable will conceivably also present challenges to privacy...

...Cable's promises of yesterday have been broken...

...The growing importance of advertising compels program producers to take few risks, to strive for what is most likely to be consumed by the most people...

...The co-op plans to offer Davis's 40,000 citizens a mix of community, cultural, and "market-oriented" programming...

...But a mountain and seventy miles stood between his customers and the signals broadcast by television stations in Philadelphia...

...The cable industry is interested in marketability, not diversity, and developing mass audiences continues to be the major concern of cable system operators and advertisers...

...The Government does allow municipalities to collect up to 3 per cent of a local cable franchise's annual gross revenues (up to 5 per cent with special FCC approval...

...Two-way technology has been available for some time, but another factor has determined the degree to which the technology has been used: profitability...

...Since the mid-1970s, deregulation has been the Commission's prime concern...

...Network executives said the enterprise had fulfilled all but one of the goals they had set for it...

...Those factors prompted White to ask, "If you can't do it in Davis, where in hell can you do it...

...Adecade ago, in The Wired Nation, Ralph Lee Smith observed that "the way to succeed in commercial U.S...

...Interactive cable might also deepen the urban-rural schism, since as many as thirty million American homes in rural areas will never be cabled...

...The Justices ruled that the access provision violated the Communications Act of 1934, which governs all forms of telecommunications in this country...

...People tend to ascribe to the technology magical powers it cannot possess...

...The opening of the FM radio band was supposed to ensure program diversity, but station owners quickly found it more profitable to adopt homogenized formats—"easy listening," country-and-western, rock...

...Even the broadcast networks have elbowed their way into the business to the degree allowed by the Federal Communications Commission...

...Two-way cable might be useful to televise town meetings, and it could serve as a vehicle for call-in programs...

...A major reason for cable deregulation is that the broadcasters view it [cable] as less of a threat since they have an interest in it," says Vincent Mosco, professor of communications at Temple University and author of Push Button Fantasies...

...About fifteen of the nation's fifty largest cable systems are owned by companies whose primary business has been publishing...

...Only the advent of new systems of ownership and control will permit technology to serve human needs rather than "marketplace realities...

...That's the only way we'll see if in fact such schemes will mean more democracy and more diversity of programming...

...In 1981, Westinghouse, which manufactures cable equipment, bought Telepromp-ter, the nation's third-largest cable system operator, for $646 million...

...In 1980, Time's Video Group surpassed the entire NBC television network in earnings...

...The press predicted that cable would irrigate the "vast wasteland" of commercial broadcast television decried by former Federal Communications Chairman Newton Minow...

...In the 1960s, however, ambitious cable entrepreneurs began importing distant television signals, thereby bringing competitors up against those stations closest to the cable consumers...

...The other half of the capital investment will be lent by the National Consumer's Cooperative Bank...

...The claim is rejected by Les Brown, editor of Channels, who notes, "Cable is uniquely equipped, among all media, to advance the ideal of free speech and create an open marketplace of ideas...

...Although about forty experiments with two-way cable are in the works, the dreams of transforming television sets into home post offices, newspapers, banks, stores, and schools remain just dreams...

...It's time to pull ourselves out of the blue sky and settle down to earth to talk about marketplace realities," said Anna Marie Hutchison, head of the California Cable Television Association...

...Other California cities, such as San Bruno and possibly Palo Alto, are expected to experiment with municipal ownership or joint private/public cable ventures...

...And "unprofitable" programs, such as locally produced documentaries, would have a chance of going out on the cables...

...Johnson's analysis is more and more applicable to the cable industry: The four largest pay cable programmers, for instance, serve 85 per cent of the nation's pay cable subscribers and each has an interest in one of the four companies that serve 21 per cent of the country's basic cable subscribers...

...I think it's significant for various alternative ownership schemes to get their chance," he said...

...it had not attracted enough advertising, its only source of revenue...

...The political or civic potential of interactive cable is similarly ambivalent...

...As long as the television executives looked upon cable as an ally, as they did in the 1950s, the Commission was content to leave the cable interests unregulated...

...Indeed, early backers of cable predicted that it would mirror the publishing industry's drift toward specialization, a tendency encouraged by the failure of such general-interest magazines as Life, Look, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post...