As usual, this will be a long and complicated story.
So when cable TV subscriber lists soared, there were many areas in the U.S. that were all or mostly unserved. That’s because, in sparsely-populated rural locations, it didn’t make sense for a company to lay wire, or if they did, it would cost the customer an unseemly amount of money.
Forget about a TV antenna. Cable TV was actually created to provide a central connection point to provide TV service in areas too distant from the transmission tower to get decent reception by a regular antenna — or any reception.