Broadcast TV in crisis: the Big Four vs the A.C.D.C. cable kabal

texture · B.S. (the pre-millennial cable wars, "four years prior" to Y.P.W.)

• When: B.S. late-pre-Subsidized (the events Hal's Y.P.W. paper treats as "four years prior," "more or less overlapping with the waxing of the Gentle Era") — as printed; the paper itself dates to May Y.P.W.
• What: As reconstructed in Hal's seventh-grade Intro-to-Entertainment-Studies research paper, the Network industry (the Big Three plus Fox) was already dying: cable proliferation, VCR advances that auto-edited commercials, and the hand-held remote had gutted the ad-rates its overhead demanded. America's 100-plus regional and national cable networks coalesced under Malone (TCI), Turner (TBS), and "a shadowy Albertan figure" into the American Council of Disseminators of Cable (A.C.D.C.), which — via Boston's Viney & Veals — attacked the Big Four ideologically, deriding four-network "passivity" and extolling the "empoweringly American choice" of 500-plus cable options ("Don't Sit Still for Anything Less"). The setup for the collapse: a viewing public conditioned to equate choice-in-spectation with freedom itself.