Once upon a time the cable TV has the first choice for watching TV shows as it was supreme to any other technology on the market at the time. Cable TV was spread out into homes all over the country. It had many advantages of which providing a wide selection of channels and doing it through air and without any affect caused by atmospheric disturbances.

They're doing something else. Paying for a specific program to have it run in the background would be ridiculous.

Sure the technology wasn't a hundred percent perfect and even at the time there were other ways of getting TV into the common homes. Some of these were "over the air broadcasting", satellite TV and video cassettes, but for TV watching populace (or the majority of them), cable TV had the right balance of practicality, cost and variety of programs and shows.

In the beginning of the 1990s there was a giant advance in satellite TV technology and all of a sudden it became cheap enough to have the ordinary people subscribe to hundreds of channels without having the break the bank. This instantly removed the ten foot antennae that a lot of people had planted in both the front- and backyards. Even the people living in the country side (where the cables didn't run and where "over the air broadcasts" couldn't reach) could now afford the same TV options as everyone else. How it when on is still a mystery, but somehow the concept of cable TV managed to survive the new satellite outburst. It has actually, with great effort, started to make something of a rebound as you read these lines. It'll be interesting to see how it is going to unfold.

Today's Biggest Threat


Today the biggest threat to both cable TV and satellite TV is the increasing capacity to transmit video over the Internet. The spread of computers in every home (and most homes have more that one computer already) and the increasing prevalence of high speed Internet connections has made people turn more and more to this solution. The average human spend hours behind the computer every day and the companies behind the technology are quite to take advantage of that. If they could just keep people a little longer that would mean more money for them.

So they reason for the advance in computer technology is simple and we can see that it is constantly getting better at processing the massive amounts of information that go along with broadcasting and streaming both video and music.

Get a Share of the Trend


More and more companies are positioning themselves to get their share of the trend. They do so by offering programs that can be instantly downloaded for free from their websites. To take an example, the company Starz (big movie provider) has put number of movies on their website to be freely downloaded and they are not the only ones that have thought of that idea.

You will even find companies that aren't into the TV industry and has no channels (e.g. AOL) that are still creating huge archives of older sporting events, music videos and TV shows and making them available to the broad audience online.

If you are wondering why all of this is a threat to satellite TV and cable TV providers, it is because the technology provides another option for people to watch their favorite TV shows and movies, which will largely cut them out of the grand picture. The TV people fear that if anyone can download any TV show that they want in order to watch it when they feel like it, then they won't bother to subscribe to a TV service. It might seem a little extreme but the companies are "better safe than sorry".

It might not end up in as bad a scenario as the cable companies prepare for and one major reason is that a lot of people like having the TV on simply as background noise while tus to most people.