Lo-Res, 6 mb - Making Connections - Time Warner Cable

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Milton Berle and other radio personalities made the
transition to television and helped spark tremendous
public demand for the medium in the immediate postwar
years. A regulatory “freeze” on new broadcast television
licenses lasting from 1948 to 1952 created an opportunity
for pioneering cable operators to gain a toehold in the
business.
RIGHT
Federal Communications Commission members, shown
here visiting a CATV antenna site, were uncertain how, or
even whether, to regulate cable television in its early years.
10 Making Connections : Time Warner Cable and the Broadband Revolution
“The Freeze”
With war’s end, it was finally time for television,
the medium of the future for the previous two
decades, to make its sustained commercial debut.
In late 1947, 17 stations were on the air. A year later,
that number had jumped to nearly 50. Radio and
Television News declared 1948 the “Year of
Television.” 9
The popular press was all but obsessed with the
new technology, even if viewers comprised less
than one-half of 1 percent of households and
remained clustered around major urban markets,
led by New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. 10
The coverage also conveyed a sense of uncertainty
about the impact of the new technology
on American society and, at least by implication, on
existing communications media, including news-
papers, magazines, radio, and film. Newsweek
described television in October 1948 as a “locomotive
on the loose.” 11 Time weighed in the
following January with an article on television
titled, “Young Monster.” 12
The growing number of television broadcast
stations was impressive yet manageable, as far as
the FCC was concerned. It was what was coming
down the pipeline that had regulators worried.
From 30 applications for television broadcast
licenses in October 1947, the demand soared
tenfold to 300 by October 1948. Profits remained
elusive. Not even RCA’s National Broadcasting
Company subsidiary was making money in
television broadcasting at that point. 13
More important, earlier FCC decisions allocating
television spectrum to the 12-channel very high
frequency (VHF) band was leading to signal
interference, as experts had predicted, from
channels being broadcast from stations in
different cities—in some cases, as far apart as