Most early commercial communications satellites were built for and operated by telecommunications companies. RCA, with its own
RCA Astro Electronics satellite construction business, identified a role for itself as a satellite owner/operator. Satcom 1 was used as the launching ground for many cable TV services including
HBO,
Showtime,
Superstation TBS,
Nickelodeon, the
CBN cable network (now
Freeform),
ESPN, and
The Weather Channel. The satellite spurred the cable television industry to unprecedented heights with the assistance of HBO (who moved their programming from the competing
Westar 1, where they had been since their nationwide debut in 1975, to Satcom 1 in February 1976). Cable television networks relay signals to ground-based
cable television headends using satellites, which allowed cable TV to enter into the suburban and metropolitan markets, thus allowing HBO to accumulate 1.6 million subscribers by the end of 1977. A notable legal battle involved
Ted Turner suing RCA to get a Satcom 1 transponder in 1980 for the launch of
CNN on 1 June 1980. CNN had been scheduled for a Satcom 3 transponder but that satellite failed to reach geosynchronous orbit upon its launch on 7 December 1979. Shortly after its launch, Satcom 1 was the first satellite used by broadcast TV networks in the United States. The networks
ABC,
NBC, and
CBS distributed their programming content to some local affiliate stations, which had before relied on
AT&T's terrestrial microwave and coaxial networks to distribute and relay programming (although NBC used satellite delivery via Satcom 1 for select affiliates on an experimental basis for this purpose in the late 1970s). The networks fed to both Satcom 1 and AT&T's network at the same time (for the benefit of those stations who hadn't yet been equipped with
Earth station equipment for reception of the satellite) up until the
breakup of AT&T in 1984, when the networks switched exclusively to satellite distribution on Satcom 1 (and later satellites), due to the much lower transmission costs, as well as due to AT&T's divestiture itself. The reason that Satcom 1 was so widely used by both cable and broadcast TV networks is that it had twice the communications capacity of the competing
Westar 1 (24 transponders as opposed to Westar 1's 12), which resulted in lower transponder usage costs in general. == Satellite fleet ==