In a lot of ways, the cable TV industry would be very happy right now if satellite TV had never become the low cost option for getting a huge number of high quality channels anywhere in the country. That's because before satellite TV companies like Dish Network came along in the early nineteen nineties, the typical television viewer thought that the one hundred channels that most cable TV providers were supplying to them was a lot of channels. Then, when Dish Network arrived on the seen, the sky was the limit for the number of channels that could be provided for television viewers. In fact, Dish Network had such an incredibly high bandwidth for transmitting television programming that new channels were created just to fill it up.
Needless to say, this revolution of satellite technology put the entire cable industry at a huge disadvantage. Customers were demanding more channels, but the cable companies were already delivering all of the television programming that their cable networks could carry. Unable to keep up with the new demand for channels, the cable companies lost customers in droves to the satellite TV providers like Dish Network. Now, while some cable companies have made valiant efforts to upgrade their networks to bear more traffic, the vast majority of them are still struggling along at that one hundred channel mark.
To make matters worse, Dish Network has only increased the number of channels it offers over the past decade. It's also begun to offer a greater variety of programming packages so that people with a variety of budgets and programming needs can find the exact package that they need. These programming packages can range in size from thirty channels all the way up to two hundred and seventy. The large number of channels provided by Dish Network also allow it to offer additional channels that can be used to customize the programming packages that it offers its customers. Cable TV operators just don't have the flexibility to do that.
There's also a new challenge in the form of high definition television which poses and even larger threat to the cable industry than Dish Network did back in the nineties. That's because each high definition television channel requires as much bandwidth as ten normal channels. This creates a serious problem for cable TV providers who are already running at capacity with all of their normal channels. They're stuck in the difficult position of driving away subscribers by eliminating tens of channels just to provide a few high def channels or driving away subscribers by refusing to provide high def channels. It's really a no win situation and as more programming makes the switch over to high definition and more television viewers decide that they want to watch television in high def, it's only going to get worse. Dish Network has more than enough bandwidth to handle all of the high definition channels currently in existence and will easily be able to add even more bandwidth when the need arises as it surely will in the future.
All of this is having an adverse effect on cable TV rates too. Cable TV has been more expensive than Dish Network from the beginning, and as cable companies scramble to catch up to Dish Network technologically, those rates keep getting even higher.
Dish Network was a death sentence to the cable TV industry. It's only a matter of time until the sentence is carried out.
