The Cable Expansion and the End of Scarcity
Launch library · evergreen read
When cable television widened the number of available channels, it quietly ended an era defined by scarcity. Audiences who had grown used to a handful of options suddenly faced dozens, then hundreds, of choices, and viewing habits had to adjust to genuine abundance for the first time.
This expansion allowed for a different kind of programming altogether. Channels no longer needed to appeal to the broadest possible audience simultaneously, since a smaller, dedicated viewership could sustain a specialised channel in ways that would have been commercially impossible under the old broadcast model.
The result was a slow fragmentation of the shared viewing experience that earlier decades had taken for granted. Television became less a single shared conversation and more a wide collection of overlapping ones, a shift that streaming would later accelerate dramatically further still, splitting audiences even further apart.