Cable Executives See More Competition in TV’s Future : Media: Four major figures tell Anaheim convention audience that there will be many more channels which will be transmitted more clearly.

By the turn of the century, television viewers can expect to see many more channels and see them more clearly, leaders of the cable television industry told the 23rd annual Western Cable Conference Wednesday.

In a panel discussion kicking off the conference here, four major figures in cable and broadcast television agreed that the reason for the expansion was competition. But they disagreed about the technological mix that will bring this bounty into their homes.

“It looks to me like terrestrial (cable) networks are going to go into a Golden Age,” said John C. Malone, president of Tele-Communications Inc.

“I see it as an age of the cable industry doing the things that have made it great,” Malone said, “but (with) greater reliability, higher quality pictures, more diversity, greater customer choice. . . . Doing the job so well, in such a consumer-friendly fashion that it will continue to gain position as the dominant delivery mechanism.”

Burton Staniar, chairman of Westinghouse Broadcasting, said “broadcasting is going to be more competitive,” insisting that cable would not replace over-the-air broadcasters such as his company. “I haven’t seen a medium yet that has replaced another one,” he said. “I don’t think any of the ones coming along are going to do it.”

Ted Turner, chairman of Turner Broadcasting System disagreed, predicting a bleak future for the commercial broadcasting networks.

He said that when cable reaches 75% of penetration--it is now around 60%--that will be essentially universal coverage because the 25% of the homes that will not be hooked up to cable will be the least demographically desirable: core city, the unemployed, the homeless. Turner added that the competition for viewers “will make it difficult for all programmers to prosper and survive--both broadcasters and cable programmers.”

“Americans have always shown a willingness to want more,” said Robert Wussler, president of Comsat Video Enterprises, citing the demand for the growth of professional baseball.

“All of us on this panel grew up with three or four or five television station channels wherever we came from, and today we have 35 channels,” Wussler said. “I’m convinced that in the year 2000 we’ll have 100 television channels.”

Malone surprised some in the audience by saying he had changed his mind about the future of direct broadcast satellites (DBS), which some considered a serious challenge to the cable industry.

Backers of DBS say it will broadcast a whole spectrum of channels directly to small, inexpensive satellite receivers. Most in the industry believe that such satellites could be profitable by offering 40 to 50 channels of first-run movies on a pay-per-view basis, along with live sporting events.

The main target of pay-per-view, the panelists agreed, was the $11-billion home video store market, which one panelist called “a pot of gold.”

“I believe there will be an explosion in the pay-per-view area,” Malone predicted, and that “critical mass will be achieved somewhere in the mid-90s.”

However, while his company has been involved in several DBS projects, believing that “satellite was the right technology,” Malone said he now believes that technological changes in the past year made it economically feasible to greatly expand cable channel capacity through fiber optics instead.

Ultimately, this new technology will enable cable operators to deliver large numbers of pay-per-view movies, high-definition television and other “exotic services,” Malone said, without having to rely on satellites.

Direct broadcast satellites would still provide a “bridging technology” until fiber-optic technology is in place. It could also reach those rural homes which will never be connected to cable, now estimated to number 6 million to 8 million.