Television Without Borders

Imagine a television without a cable system. You’ve been wanting to see Rihanna’s music video for Umbrella in MTV but you can’t because your television system is just a mere box showcasing you the same old crap. Cable TV has definitely maximized our viewing choices and it has been continuously evolving to bring surprises to the audience.

It was originally dubbed as Community Antenna Television on its birth last 1948. Cable TV has then expanded its purpose from merely improving picture quality to distributing pay television programming nationwide or worldwide. Home Box Office (HBO) became the first programming service to be delivered nationwide via satellite. Cable providers then feature more channels to cater the various tastes of the viewers. Viewers themselves have almost made the cable TV a necessary equipment on their household sets. Clients who want to avail the cable service may choose their modes of payment whether it would be prepaid or postpaid

TV programming has widened to a number of selection with the popularity of Cable TV. A viewer may choose to stick watching shows in the standard TV line up or pick among broadcast of films, live sports events, fashion shows or international and multi-lingual programs.

Cable television also offers a great variety of special interest channels devoted to subjects such as food, history, home and garden, health, or ethnic issues, offering advertisers access to more narrowly defined target audiences than those available through the six major national networks CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, Warner Bros., UPN and resulting in the evolution of specialized niche advertising.

The development of the Cable TV continues to arise thus the introduction to the offering of customers advanced telecommunication services. One of these is the pay per view.

With the pay per view system, viewers can purchase shows and events and pay for private telecast of that show or event to their homes. These shows such as movies, sports and adult films can be purchased via an on-screen guide, an automated telephone system or through a live customer service representative.

Cable services have also established an approach that addresses the parents' concerns on indecency and violence. The parental control technology was then introduced to mediate the quantity of programs that the cable has been offering. Through this technology also known as the “V Chip,” a parent has the power to block certain programs that they think is unsuitable for their children.

Another exciting innovation of the cable is the HDTV. HDTV is a transition from the analog TV broadcasting system to an all-digital system. However, to experience true high-definition television in one's home, one needs a source of HDTV signals, a tuner to receive and decode those signals, and a high-performance display screen that can reproduce the remarkable detail and color of HDTV images, but with the fast-paced technology that we have, reaching these to everyone’s homes would not be that farfetched.

With all these services actualizing, Cable TV is not far from opening doors to much more number of possibilities.