With all of the advantages that newer television transmission technologies have over cable TV, it's really pretty surprising that cable TV still has subscribers. When you get right down to it, mere cables simply don't have the capacity to transmit nearly as many channels of TV and other media as satellite TV technology.
The satellite TV company Dish Network is a great example of this. Dish Network has access to over five hundred total television channels and many more audio channels that include Sirius satellite radio programming. Of course nobody can use a full five hundred channels of TV, and because of this, Dish Network has divided all of these channels into smaller programming packages. The largest programming package that you can get from Dish Network has two hundred and seventy channels- thirty of which are HDTV channels. This programming package can have even more channels than that when optional channels are added on. The total could easily approach three hundred television channels, and with satellite radio channels the total could easily go up to four hundred choices of entertainment.
When you contrast what Dish Network is capable of offering with what even the best cable TV providers offer, there's simply no real comparison. Even the best cable TV companies only provide about two hundred channels, and one hundred is a much more common maximum number of channels for a cable company to provide. Since there are many more cable companies that provide a maximum number of channels on the order of one hundred than there are that provide up to two hundred channels, Dish Network is in competition with the ones with one hundred or so channels. These smaller cable companies mostly serve small to mid sized towns located in rural areas. This is exactly the same market that satellite TV companies like Dish Network excel at reaching simply because they are relatively isolated, and there are many people who live right outside of these towns who can't be served by the cable companies simply because the cable networks don't extend out far enough to reach them. These companies are especially behind when it comes to adapting to newer technologies like digital TV and HDTV because they simply don't have a big enough base of subscribers to spread out the cost of upgrades.
The limiting factor when it comes to transmitting any kind of TV programming is bandwidth. Bandwidth is the capacity to transmit a given amount of information in a given amount of time. The fact is that the some cables have a much more limited bandwidth than others and all of the cables that anyone has come up with so far have a much more limited bandwidth than the electromagnetic signals that Dish Network uses to transmit its TV and satellite radio programming. Most of these smaller cable TV companies (which means most cable TV companies in general) are still using cable networks that were installed back in the seventies and eighties, and while those cable networks were just fine for delivering up to one hundred analog TV channels then, they simply don't meet people's expectations for hundreds of digital TV channels now. The fact that most of the companies that run these networks provide TV to small towns means that they just don't have enough subscribers to finance the upgrades that are so desperately needed. Dish Network can provide the programming that people want right and with much lower subscription rates than what the more limited cable companies are charging.
