When did cable come out?

Answer 1

The first cable TV system was most likely created in the late 50's to early sixties. At that time, they were called CATV systems, or community antenna systems, where a town was sandwiched in a valley or where the closest TV stations were so far away that the normal rooftop antenna couldn't receive a clear picture.

So, what they usually did was erect a large tower and put the antennas up high. Then they would amplify the signal and send it to their cable feeds to the homes. It was a nonjjnesnjieuhenunfrrkpf;c

Then someone got the idea to set up some weather gauges and put a video camera on it, feeding an RF modulator on some open channel and that was the birth of the local cable company.

After that, satellite communications became possible and then program providers could send their shows all over the country. The cable providers would set up their `head end`, which was a collection of satellite dishes and other equipment to be able to send the signal down their cable, for a fee, of course.

That's a brief explanation and it would take some research to identify the first `official` cable company, but by and large, that's how many got their starts.

Answer 2

Cable became common in the early 1980s. My father saw the 1981 NFC Championship Game (January 14, 1982) on "rabbit-ears" television, and some YouTube videos of that game and Super Bowl XVI shortly after are bright in color, and others are dark in color. The dark ones are over-the-air, and the bright ones are clean quality cable. This means that it was around this time people were making the transition to cable TV.

Answer 3

That depends on your area, my area (Boston area, in particular the south shore area) received cable from a provider called continental cablevision that started local cable tv operations roughly between 1980 to 1985 (year varies by local community), Proper Boston (the city itself) received cable in 1983, many community's in the greater Boston area received cable after & less before that year (some did receive it on that year too of course), in 1996, it got bought out by media one, in the summer of 2000, AT&T broadband bought media one out, and in late 2002, that got bought out by Comcast, as that's what I have now. Some rural areas (like northeast Vermont, a lot of western Kansas, some parts of central/northern Maine, etc.) still don't have cable tv, & those areas satellite providers love, because that's all you can get in those areas.

Answer 4

According to the Canadian Communications Foundation, it was a long and slow process. As with the US, a few individual experimenters began trying to create cable TV as far back as 1949-1950. Their vision was not a national network, however; they merely wanted to be able to pull in distant TV signals. Among the Canadian experimenters who had some limited success were two men from London, Ontario-- Ed Jarmain and Harry Anderson, both of whom were able to set up their own local cable TV systems circa 1950-1951. But while the US had cable channels like HBO up and running in 1972-1973, and a number of other cable channels began appearing from 1975-1977, progress in Canada was much slower. Due to bureaucracy and disagreements at the government level about how much Canadian content would be required, it wasn't till around 1982-1983 that cable channels and networks finally began to appear in Canada.