Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (review)

This book fills a long-time need. It provides the definitive history of the medium on which well over two-thirds of American households rely for their television reception (and many for Internet as well). Given that the business began (as community antenna television in both Pennsylvania and Oregon) some 60 years ago, it's been a long wait. After all, we already had the first "histories" of radio broadcasting in the 1920s within just a few years of the initial stations going on the air (indeed, the pioneering history of wireless technology had appeared in 1899)—and the first history of television appeared during World War II when few Americans had yet seen it.

For some reason the telling of this whole cable story has taken far longer to find the researcher willing to undertake what, granted, must have been a huge task. Surely one reason is that for years cable's was a decentralized story with activities taking place across the nation. Only with the rise of cable networks and huge multiple system operators (starting around 1980) does the story take on the more usual network-centric form we are accustomed to with commercial media industries. As for the first two decades of existence of this medium there was little regulatory oversight from either the federal or the state governments, historical records are scattered and hard to locate.

While there have been a few earlier studies that have taken on aspects of the cable story, none is as broadly based or comprehensive as this one. The first, Mary Alice Mayer Phillips' CATV: A History of Community Antenna Television (1972), appeared on the eve of important national policy decisions, and thus focused entirely on the "old" and local business cable. Don LeDuc's Cable Television and the FCC (1973) centered on national policy developments. Thomas Southwick's Distant Signals (1998) pulled a lot of the personal stories together in a useful way, but lacked documentation or even an index. And more recently, Megan Mullen's Television in the Multichannel Age (2008) provides a briefer survey of the whole story, designed for potential text use. Each of them helps, perhaps ironically, to underline what Patrick Parsons has accomplished with his more complete study.

Parsons teaches at Pennsylvania State University's College of Communications, and has written widely about cable before in both articles and books (see, for example, Parsons and Robert Frieden, The Cable and Satellite Television Industries, 1997; and Parsons, Cable Television and the First Amendment, 1989). His new history is a hefty one, as well it might be given all the players and the sturm und drang of the industry's periods of development.

In fourteen essentially chronological chapters, Parsons takes readers through the long and often convoluted development of something most of us now take for granted. They describe and assess the evolution of a revolution (taking the story into the 1930s, focusing on the technological precursors); pioneering efforts at cable systems (to 1952); the "mom 'n' pop" business when cable, which was largely a locally owned small-scale business (the 1950s); cable going to Washington (the initial policy debates and legal cases—the former reached the Supreme Court half a century ago); cable's new frontier (the early 1960s); the wired nation (the national policy debate of 1966–1972 when almost anything seemed possible); the cable fable (deregulation, thus laying the groundwork for expansion); the phoenix (1975–1980, when the industry shifted to satellite networks and new programming that hugely broadened its appeal); cablemania (the expansion of cable networks—and cable in the home, and the first legislation—in the early 1980s); the cable boom (to 1992); the cable "cosa nostra" (the consolidated industry of greed as it appeared to Washington from 1986 to 1992); 500 channels (the programming cornucopia of the 1990s); and "what's gonna be next?" covering events of the past decade.

Parsons relates all this based...