Cable Television

Among the family of pulse time modulation (PTM) techniques, square wave frequency modulation (SWFM) is particularly well suited to the transmission of high-quality wideband instrumentation and video signals such as MAC and high definition TV over optical fibres due to its attractive combination of performance and simplicity. This paper discusses aspects of SWFM and describes two experimental systems employing novel demodulators suitable for 5.5 MHz (PAL) and 12 MHz wide format MAC bandwidth systems respectively. >

This chapter executes a reading of the character of Walter White / Heisenberg ('Breaking Bad') through John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'.  This chapter pays attention to issues related to Mill's harm principle, freedom, individuality, individual sovereignty, individual spontaneity, collective mediocrity, authority, the tyranny of the majority, legislated morality, justice, and punishment.

In this study we develop an empirical model to explain failure rates of new television series. Specifically, we test the ability of three factors to predict the success of new dramatic series appearing on 31 cable networks over the last 10 years. Those factors are the originality of the story, the track record of its creator(s), and the cognitive complexity of its pilot episode script—all of which are known well in advance of a network’s decision to greenlight a new series. As predicted, we find that all three variables—both individually and in combination—strongly predict the success rate of new dramatic series in their first two seasons.

The existing literature on ESPN tends to explain the network’s phenomenal success as a function of savvy executives, charismatic talent, and Americans’ insatiable appetite for sports. Each of these factors has certainly been important; however, ESPN did not achieve its dominance in a vacuum. This chapter identifies several key law and policy developments that since the 1960s have shaped the sports, cable, and satellite television industries in ways that were fortuitous for ESPN. Yes, ESPN’s executives recognized Americans’ demand for live sports and witty banter; however, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the markets for sports or media. They are products of struggle over law and policy, and ESPN has been a clear beneficiary of those struggles.

Keywords: ESPN, Political Economy of the Media, Cable Television, Media History, Media Policy

In this study we develop an empirical model to explain failure rates of new television series. Specifically, we test the ability of three factors to predict the success of new dramatic series appearing on 31 cable networks over the last 10 years. Those factors are the originality of the story, the track record of its creator(s), and the cognitive complexity of its pilot episode script—all of which are known well in advance of a network's decision to greenlight a new series. As predicted, we find that all three variables—both individually and in combination—strongly predict the success rate of new dramatic series in their first two seasons.

This article traces connections between the institutional configuration of the AMC basic cable channel and the deliberately paced narratives of its original series, such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Rubicon. Scholarly and popular discourses concerning U.S. drama series frequently observe the divergent ways in which the economic models of network and premium cable each influence series production, emphasizing the fundamental distinctions between the two institutional types. Yet such discourses, by relying on this paradigm of institutional binary, often overlook the role of basic cable’s economic model in the commissioning of drama series. This article explores the unique implications of this model along with the specificity of AMC’s particular institutional configuration. Utilizing a combination of narrative and industrial analysis, the article determines the economic logics that enable AMC to situate its series’ slow-burn storytelling within an advertiser-supported context.

The first season of HBO’s popular series True Detective (2014), set in rural Louisiana, has garnered critical attention due to its postmodern sensibilities, postsecular metaphysics, and its star-studded cast, yet the show’s navigation of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast remains under-examined. This essay focuses on what creator Nic Pizzolatto designates the “third lead” of the show: the poisoned landscapes of Louisiana’s ubiquitous petroleum industry. In a narrative that ostensibly invokes the Southern Gothic to cast its fictional corruption as regional peculiarity, the omnipresent spectacle of the petro-industrial complex implicates transnational networks of capital in the region’s “slow violence.” In this way, True Detective’s oily aesthetics provides a crucial framework through which to examine the ecologies of violence sustained by oil capitalism. Drawing on materialist ecocriticism such as Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeMenager’s “petromelancholia,” this essay argues that True Detective’s visual emphasis on oil, which emerges most provocatively in the main-title sequence, offers a crucial aesthetic strategy for representing the ambivalent pleasures and anxieties of U.S. fossil-fuel modernity. As images of bodies and oil continually entangle through superimposition and dissolves, True Detective mobilizes a queer intimacy of human and environment that insists on apprehending petromodernity through its making and unmaking of identities.

Abstract: In a recent study of the Tampa (Florida) market, TRAC Media Services acquired some interesting information about the market's response to its two public television stations. WEDU is a VHF-signal community station that reaches about 745,000 households in a ...

Potential competition in the US cable television industry is empirically examined for 385 markets. Predicted entry probabilities are included in a supply-demand model to permit empirical investigation of the effect of potential competition on incumbent cable operator’s price and channel programming decisions. Estimation results show incumbents offer more channels to consumers in markets facing greater potential competition from broadband service provider (BSP) wireline overbuilders and/or incumbent local exchange carriers. In particular, when the probability of entry rises to about 42  the average cable system provides six more channels, and price per channel declines from US$ 0.77 to US$ 0.66.

Optical fiber offers many advantages over coaxial cable for the transmission of radio frequency (rf) signals in antenna-remoting applications, as well as cellular networks and cable television (CATV) signal distribution networks. Optical fiber shows significantly less loss, can support signals demanding much higher bandwidth, is immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI), and enables considerable size and weight savings when compared to coaxial cable. Free-space optics (FSO) communications is a technology that uses ...

After three decades of what Chief Justice Burger termed ‘the almost explosive development’ of cable television, Congress updated the Communications Act of 1934 with the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984. The Act represents the culmination of a ‘decade long effort to update the Communications Act of 1934 . . . and bring our outdated communications laws into the information age.’ The 1984 Cable Act was a complicated piece of legislation, the result of countless compromises and political deals. This Article explains how Congress attempted to balance the competing, and sometimes mutually exclusive, interests of the cable operators, cities, video programmers, and the viewing public.

This essay is the first in a three-part series about ideology and space on AMC's lauded television show "Mad Men." See the attached link to "Flow"'s website, where the article was published, for embedded videos intended to be viewed alongside reading the essay.

New broadband access technologies such as hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) are likely to provide fast and cost effective support to a variety of applications including video on demand (VoD), interactive computer games, and Internet-type applications such as Web browsing, FTP, email, and telephony. Since most of these applications, use TCP as the transport layer protocol, the key to their success

I wish to formally acknowledge that the city of Vancouver is on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish speaking peoples and thank them for the guardianship of this place. Beginning in the 1960s Vancouver's hyper active media art scene was a hotbed of experimentation, collaboration, technical play and radical engagement, with a proliferation of organizations engaged with media art. Rather than proposing a holistic understanding of the forces that shaped and articulated the Vancouver media scene of the 1960s through the early 1990s I have chosen antecedents to personal points of engagement and some eleven moments of disruption with which I am familiar. These include radicalizations, institutional partnerships, autonomous/semi-autonomous artists' formations; campaigns for mass media inclusion; feminist media impulses; Lotus-Land sociality; leadership inside and outside the academy; internationalism and race consciousness; indigenous self-government; interdisciplinarity; anti-censorship activism. I will attempt to summon the flavors of the times through text and image.

Summary: The paper deals with some investigations aimed at applying compensation techniques to reduce nonlinear signal distortion in the Mach-Zehnder modulator of HFC CATV systems. The frequency distribution of second-and third-order intermodulation products of N-channel transmission systems is shown. Models of dual-parallel and dual-cascade Mach-Zehnder modulators are suggested based on both the mathematical model of a conventional Mach-Zehnder modulator and the features of the CATV system itself, thus making it possible for the modulator parameters to be determined in a way to ensure CSO products cancellation and CTB products minimization. The dependence of the C/CTB parameter on the modulation index is studied for N-channel HFC CATV systems applying a dual-parallel or dual-cascade Mach-Zehnder modulator. Optical channels implementing dual-parallel or dual-cascade Mach-Zehnder modulator instead of a conventional one are compared and the possibilities to improve the RF signals&apos...