CABLE SHOW 2012 ANALYSIS: U.S. cable industry accepts unknown future, breaks new ground

BOSTON – In its younger days, the cable industry moved, for the times, at a pretty good speed on the technical front. While operators in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s concentrated on signing up subscribers, delivering clear signals, and then launching an ever-increasing number of new channels, they were heavily reliant on just a couple of big suppliers and their engineers for their most important network systems. General Instrument (Jerrold before that and now known as Google-owned Motorola) and Scientific-Atlanta (now Cisco) were the two dominant players for ages. There were lots of other suppliers of many other things,...