Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cable television began as a commercial business in the United States in the 1950s. Its origins trace to 1948, when community antenna systems were built to deliver signals to areas blocked from broadcast reception by mountains or distance. The abbreviation CATV, standing for community antenna television, dates from that period.
By 1988, cable television reached 52.8 percent of all American households. That figure had risen from 6.4 percent in 1968 and 7.5 percent in 1978, and climbed further to 62.4 percent by 1994.
Hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) systems use optical fiber for the trunklines running from the headend to local distribution hubs, then switch to coaxial cable for the final connection to homes. Traditional systems used coaxial cable throughout. The fiber portion provides greater bandwidth and capacity for future expansion.
The Z Channel was an early pay television service in Los Angeles that operated on midband cable frequencies before scrambling technology was widely used. It was transmitted in the clear because standard television sets of the period could not receive those signals without a separate tuner box.
The All-Channel Receiver Act of 1964 required all new television sets to include a UHF tuner. This was significant for cable because UHF channels had previously been inaccessible on standard sets, limiting the number of channels cable systems could practically distribute.
Triple play refers to the bundled offering of television, telephone, and internet access delivered over the same cable infrastructure. The term applies whether the provider is a cable company or a traditional telecommunications carrier, and it reflects the competition between those two industries for household subscriptions.