The Real Cable Innovators

 Ok, so I admit that hours of midterm testing and a couple of throat lozenges have made me somewhat giddy (I was laughing like crazy when I saw that sunsilk commercial. OMGWTF! Stuffed hair)! But seriously, there's some major amazing history I just discovered!

 Let me introduce you all to the Cable Consortium. The CC is a group (they're really made up of the major cable providers, with a big chair reserved for AOL Time Warner) dedicated to standardizing Cable communication protocols and other standards, such as digital cable (Including HDTV broadcasts) and cable modem (Still no clue to it's real name...). But let me tell you something; CC is not the innovator of the Cable Communications business. CC is just a spinoff of the springboard provided by Sega.
 The innovation provided by Sega is - in fact - Sega Channel. In the 90s, Sega introduced a service through a deal with the Time Warner Cable company (who provided the actual service) and a side deal with Scientific Atlanta (the provider of the hardware) to provide about 50 games per month to the subscriber's Sega Genesis system, as well as some original content and sneak peaks of upcoming and in-progress translation games and some original music. Sega Channel's influence was so great, that it encouraged Japanese companies to translate their games to cater to an American audience, and gave free advertisement to boot. Unfortunately, it's cancelation stopped in-production games from being completed, including Pulseman, one of the greatest linear simple-system platformers ever.
 Sega Channel's demise was only the beginning of cable innovation. After Sega pulled off the licensing for the games, the cable company utilized their advantage of the cleaned up signal to add the ability of ordering Pay-Per-View through the cable lines, as opposed to the traditional manner of telephoning. Later came the infamous cable modem, digital television, and digital voice lines. None of this actually needed any new broadcast equipment, but rather piggybacked on the new broadband data line.

 Wow, that whole Sega innovation was almost as surprising as the improvement of OpenGL2 over a windows Software renderer! Then again, maybe not....