Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television

6: The Wired Nation (1966–1972)

6 The Wired Nation (1966–1972) As cable systems are installed in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, the stage is being set for a communications revolution—a revolution that some experts call “The Wired Nation.” In addition to the telephone and to the radio and television programs now available, there can come into homes and into business places audio, video and facsimile transmissions that will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. —Ralph Lee Smith, “The Wired Nation,” 19701 I t was a new vision: television programming on demand, teleconferencing , electronic banking, shopping, and health care assistance; an electronic town square dedicated to democratic discourse, the advancement of local and national governance; instant news, information, and educational opportunity. It was an electronic cornucopia of communications goods and services. It was the utopian ideal of communications technology. It was “the wired nation,” and the wired nation was the new model for cable television. It was a revolution not in the technology, but in the social meaning of the technology, and it arose with powerful and far-reaching effects in the mid- and late 1960s. It was, in the course of cable television history, one of the most dramatic social reinventions of the medium, the archetypical example of the social construction of technology. While the technology itself was evolving in a slow but steady manner, the social conception of what CATV was and could become was taking a radical turn, a turn that would have a profound impact on pubic perception, public policy, and, ultimately, the business and nature of cable. This was the period during which the industry was to shed its original label—community antenna television—and take on a new moniker, cable television. It was also the period that gave rise to the term “Blue Skies.” Blue Sky thinking, as noted in the first chapter, was the imagining of The Wired Nation (1966–1972) / 233 cloudless, unlimited horizons of technical possibility. The mid-1960s marked the beginning of cable’s Blue Sky period, although, in one form or another, Blue Sky thinking would shape the business through its next thirty-plus years. The industry would come to play an active role in advancing much of the Blue Sky rhetoric, but in its early stages, from the view of the operators, the transition to a new concept of cable was not entirely voluntary. Beginning as early as the mid-1950s, and increasingly through the early and mid-1960s, cable suffered from a self-inflicted conceptual schizophrenia. Depending on with whom you talked, CATV was either a passive extension of the viewer’s home television antenna, or a potentially powerful new communications system capable of generating bountiful revenue streams through pay-TV, and perhaps even interconnecting into national cable programming networks. For small operators who could not afford to think in such grand terms and for CATV lawyers who had to navigate tricky legal and political waters, CATV was best seen as a cold, dead wire; in fact, its entire copyright defense was built on it. For growing MSOs such as TelePrompTer, CATV had to be something more, something larger, something that would entice institutional and private investment. This conceptual schism widened in the early 1960s, and the industry’s ambivalence was illustrated at a 1965 NCTA convention panel discussion on the topic of origination programming. Marcus Bartlett, the head of Cox Broadcasting’s CATV operations, was encouraging local origination but only for public service events such as city council meetings and high school football games. NCTA legal counsel Strat Smith was more cautious, recommending that any origination be kept separate from the primary passive antenna function. The experienced lawyer suggested that the former could arguably be regulated, but the latter should remain immune from federal control.2 NCTA lawyers realized that no matter what cable did physically with the signal, the perception of what it did, could and should be molded to the benefit of the industry; they were successful in this effort for many years. By the mid-1960s, they were losing ground at the FCC and in the courts. The Commission had declared that cable systems did not and could not provide outlets for community expression, it was clearly was worried about cable’s potential to offer pay-TV, and the agency supported legislation that would have banned local cable origination programming. In the courts...