C-SPAN

• There’s one thing that television viewers can count on in 2024: higher fees and more commercials.
• The major streaming services – Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Max – have all announced rate hikes and new advertising policies.
• Like their cable predecessors, streaming companies have lured people in with promises of a better and cheaper viewing experience.

Stemming the tide of ‘toll television’

• This business structure also encouraged programming with mass appeal in order to deliver the broadest possible audiences to advertisers.
• But not all TV viewers were happy with the formulaic quiz shows and sitcoms that dominated the airwaves.
• Sensing an untapped opportunity, TV entrepreneurs tried to concoct ways to circumvent the dominance of the Big Three.
• At first, this technology simply expanded the reach of CBS, NBC and ABC rather than providing a competing service.

Cable catches on

• As frustrations with the limits of broadcast television intensified across the political spectrum during the 1970s, consumers, elected officials and regulators all embraced the potential of cable television to offer an alternative.
• By the mid-1970s, experiments with programming disseminated via satellite and cable tested new types of niche channels and shows – like nonstop movies, sports, music or the weather – to see if audiences might be interested.
• Like STV before them, cable companies tapped into frustrations with broadcasting and its advertising model.

Deregulation nation

• Black Entertainment Television created new opportunities for programming geared toward Black audiences.
• The Daytime Channel offered entertainment and news directed at women, while MTV connected a younger generation through music videos.
• Then there was C-SPAN, which put the cameras on the House of Representatives starting in 1979.

Playing political football

Al Gore, then an ambitious senator representing Tennessee, saw an opportunity. He pounced on the issue of cable companies that had leveraged consumer demand into what he described as “total domination of the marketplace.”

• Malone pushed back, highlighting the unprecedented choice that people now had on cable.
• Rate increases allowed for experimentation with niche programming that never stood a chance on network broadcast stations, he added.

Everything old is new again

• That the marketplace competition and programming choice alone could deliver for the public interest.
• The expansion of a media landscape forged on the terrain of private businesses and their profit margins.
• It also convinced elected officials and constituents to embrace a different understanding of the public interest, one where the market reigns supreme.

Kathryn Cramer Brownell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.