Office of Telecommunications Policy - Cable

Cable

OTP’s two major initiatives concerning cable included the 1971 Cable Copyright Compromise and the 1974 Cabinet Committee on Cable Communications Cable: Report to the President, or “The Whitehead Report.”

OTP took a strong interest in supporting cable’s development in part because Whitehead saw that “cable promises a revolutionary diversity and a fundamentally new system of communication.”

In 1971 and 1972, cable operators were blocked by copyright owners and broadcasters who demanded fees for distributing their programs. OTP facilitated a Cable Copyright Compromise that pacified cable opponents enough to permit some industry growth.

Two years later, a Cabinet Committee on Cable chaired by Whitehead released a report denouncing industry regulation. Until the Committee’s report, cable had been seen as an extension of broadcast television, and subject to its regulations. But the 1974 Cabinet Committee on Cable Communications Cable: Report to the President advocated applying a different regulatory model to cable. It argued in part that cable did not use the publicly owned airwaves and promised a multitude of channels instead of the limited number necessitated by spectrum scarcity, which meant that cable and the television networks were not analogous businesses. Accordingly, the report reasoned, cable should be afforded the same freedom of expression as the print media.