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

In 1963, Ralph Roberts bought the first cable system
that formed the basis for the company renamed Comcast
in 1969.
22 Making Connections : Time Warner Cable and the Broadband Revolution
Alan Gerry put the Catskill Mountains of New York State on
the cable industry map in 1963 when he formed Cablevision
Industries (CVI) and rapidly became an industry innovation
leader.
Bob Magness, who was in the cotton and cattle
business in Texas in the early 1950s, got into
community antenna television after learning
about it from two installers whose truck had
broken down and needed a lift. He built his first
system in Memphis, Texas, in 1956 and, with Bill
Daniels’ help, founded a system in Bozeman,
Montana, in 1958. He moved there and began
importing stations from Salt Lake City using a
microwave link. By the 1960s, Magness and a
handful of business partners were borrowing
heavily to buy or build systems around the
country. His company, Community TV Inc., had
full or partial ownership of 24 CATV systems,
located mostly in the mountain states and
Nebraska. He moved company headquarters
to Denver in 1965 and in 1968 renamed it Tele-
Communications, Inc. (TCI). By decade’s end, his
highly leveraged enterprise was the 10 th largest
CATV company in the country. 44
One of the businessmen attracted to the industry
during this period was Ralph Joel Roberts. He
had sold his belt and suspender business in
Philadelphia in 1961, worried that the increasingly
popular sans-a-belt trend would severely limit
future growth. Shortly thereafter, he met a friend
who wanted to sell a community antenna system
in Tupelo, Mississippi. Roberts didn’t know
anything about Tupelo or CATV, but he liked the
steady cash flow attached to it. He bought the
system and founded American Cable Systems in
1963. He changed the name to Comcast in 1969. 45
Alan Gerry was fixing an amplifier on a rooftop
television antenna one very cold February day
in 1955 in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
A salesman from Jerrold Electronics who was
driving by saw him and sounded him out, over a
cup of hot coffee, about building a cable television
system in his community of Liberty, New York.
Gerry, who had received electronics training in
the U.S. Marine Corps and in technical school,
had been selling and repairing TVs for a few
years and had installed a number of antennas
in town and connected clients by wire to them,
but didn’t really have a commercial system per
se. Drawing upon Jerrold’s knowledge of the
equipment needed and the economics of the
business, Gerry rounded up a handful of local
investors and plunged in. When his system
launched in 1956, he had 300 customers paying
a one-time $130 installation fee and $3.50 a
month to receive five channels.
The mountains of Pennsylvania had bragging
rights when it came to claiming to be one of the
birthplaces, if not the only birthplace of CATV,
but Gerry was rapidly making the Catskills region
synonymous with CATV innovation. By the mid-
1960s, Gerry had bought out his rival CATV
system owners in Sullivan County, usually for
about $300 a subscriber, as well as his original
investors. To expand into other regions, including
in short order the suburbs of Boston, Gerry
became one of the first systems operators in the
Northeast to build a microwave distribution