The first cable TV systems were Community Antenna TV systems

For the first 25 years of the industry’s existence, broadcast retransmission (especially distant stations), was about the only thing they had to sell. Many systems originated local programming and carried public, educational and government access programming, but these services didn’t sell many subscriptions.

The term CATV originally stood for Community Antenna TV. Somewhere around the mid-70s, when CATV companies began carrying satellite-delivered non-broadcast programming, the term CATV morphed into Cable TV.