THIRTY YEARS AGO the launch of CNN was keeping Ted Turner busy. ESPN was on the drawing board at Getty Oil. HBO was helping Time Inc. confirm that consumers would pay for television content.
The emergence of cable and pay-TV programming marked an exciting and explosive stage in America’s communications history. As we enter a similar period with digital technology, it’s worth reviewing what was learned from the video revolution three decades ago.
As cable reached critical mass, its situation was strikingly similar to that of the Internet. It was primarily a delivery system, capable of transmitting content to places where it had not been available, and in volume - “shelf space’’ as cable programmers termed it - that seemed almost limitless.
Cable’s early entrepreneurs faced the same fundamental challenge that Internet operators are struggling with today: how to get consumers to pay for content that historically had been free. The cable industry solved this problem in two clever ways - by chopping the content into small pieces and then by packaging many of those pieces together.
First, the chopping. Instead of a single channel offering news, sports, weather, and entertainment, cable used its expanded shelf space to give each component its own separate channel. Back then, with the advent of CNN, ESPN, MTV, The Weather Channel, etc., the process was known as narrowcasting; today, on the Internet, it’s called vertical organization of content.
On the Net, for example, fans of classical music can subscribe to MusicalAmerica.com; weather buffs can pay to stay current at AccuWeather.com. The choices already seem limitless - yet they’re merely a hint of what’s to come.
Second, the packaging. Once cable customers were hooked, they were sold tiers of content, in which the narrowcast channels were combined to create simplified pricing options.
It’s no accident that Newsday, which erected a pay wall, is owned by
Each of today’s content creators - newspapers, book publishers, television, etc. - will find different lessons in cable’s history. What Amazon’s Kindle does with books and periodicals, what The Wall Street Journal does with its newspaper, and what Hulu.com does with TV programs come closest to following cable’s model for success in the digital world. Each has some control over both content and delivery, and each is creating multiple pricing tiers.
Based on cable’s experience, it is possible that major newspapers will wind up charging for all but the most basic of online content, and it will be sold in pieces: the sports section, the opinion section, the entertainment section. Networks of newspapers will be formed, so that for a single fee readers can access five or ten of the nation’s best papers.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from TV’s entrance into the video supermarket decades ago is that cable didn’t kill broadcast TV, though it forced changes.
Today, some maintain that the immediacy of the Internet and the ability of consumers to redistribute content with ease make earlier media models irrelevant. But the essential components of the cable revolution are likely to prevail in the digital age: Content is key, and consumers will support it. Quantity is appealing, but quality sells.
And the more you look at history, the less revolutionary things become.
Peter Funt is a writer and TV host. 
