New Technology May Represent Change of Fortune for Cable TV Industry

It used to be that cable TV was the technology of choice for getting TV programming. This was true even with the early availability of satellite TV, but satellite TV at the time was too expensive for most people to afford, and even those who could afford it still had to contend with the massive satellite dishes that the technology of the time required.

By the first half of the nineteen nineties, the situation changed with the introduction of new satellite TV technology that provided a much needed improvement upon both the satellite TV that came before it as well as cable TV. This new wave of satellite TV technology required only a small satellite dish that was three feet across at the most rather than the older monstrosities that were over ten feet across. At the same time, the new technology enabled satellite TV technology to deliver more channels at very reasonable prices.

The exodus of TV viewers leaving cable TV in favor of satellite TV started because of the realization that spending about the same amount of money on satellite TV that they had been paying for cable TV could provide those viewers with a much larger selection of channels. The fact that the satellite dishes were so much smaller and therefore more manageable also made a huge difference when it came to making satellite TV a realistic alternative for suburbanites who hadn't had room for the older dishes. The cable TV company made its own situation worse by dismissing the extra channels as lower quality than what cable TV provided and therefore not interesting to viewers. What the cable industry didn't take into account was that viewers like having more choices and if they could spend the same amount of money that their cable TV subscription had cost on a service that offered about three times the number of channels, all of those extra channels were essentially free. In short, nobody but the cable TV industry cared whether or not the extra channels offered by the satellite TV industry were of decent quality because they were essentially free.

Now the cable TV industry is finally implementing technology that could turn the tables in the other direction. This technology is called switched digital video. Switched digital video essentially increases the number of separate channels that a cable TV provider can offer by making better use of existing cable TV bandwidth. Right now cable TV providers simply send out all of their channels all at once to all of their subscribers. The digital receivers of the subscribers then filter out those channels. The channels that aren't part of the subscription are filtered out first, and then all of the channels that the subscriber doesn't want to watch at a given time are filtered out. This means that even though the cable TV company may be transmitting hundreds of channels over a cable- and taking up most, if not all, of the cable's bandwidth- any given viewer is only watching one of those channels at a time. Switched digital video allows the cable TV company to deliver just the channel that a viewer wants to watch at any given time. This means that the company can provide a virtually unlimited number of channels.

Switched digital video may be just the technology that the cable TV industry needs to bring customers back from satellite TV.