Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television Review

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(More customer reviews)Communications researchers now have a definitive scholarly chronicle of the cable industry. Parsons delivers an immense and exhaustive history of the industry, from its earliest days as a small town community antenna service to the modern mega-conglomerates delivering hundreds of channels of on-demand programming. Here we learn that cable isn't much younger than broadcast television, and the two industries have had a fractious but symbiotic relationship, made more complex by interloping technologies like satellite transmission and the Internet. Decades of inconsistent regulation by the FCC have added to the complexity of the industry's relations with the public. Parsons combines his strict chronological political and business history with the social construction of technology as a theoretical backdrop, showing that the public's changing perceptions of cable's technical possibilities and programming choices are a key influence on the development of the industry and its modern structure and practices. This extensive and encyclopedic tome will prove to be essential for interested students of the field for years to come. [~doomsdayer520~]

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Blue Skies is the first complete history of cable television, the most influential technology affecting the lives of almost every American. Author Patrick Parsons writes about the early days of cable -- they go back farther than most people know -- and the pioneers in the last half of the twentieth century whose business skills, entrepreneurial instinct, and luck all played out to give rise to the most ubiquitous technology in the country-- still outpacing computers and the internet -- cable TV.

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