ividuals unable or unwilling to pay for it. Therefore, the service would be funded by tax revenues raised in the jurisdiction where the service was provided. Funding for broadcast television is the issue which causes this good to be a near, as oppoed to a pure, public good. In a sense, one may claim that broadcast television is paid for on a communal basis, because the funding is provided by advertisers, who, in turn, recover the funds expended from consumers. Such an assertion, however, may be challenged on theoretical grounds. Thus, broadcast television must, at best, be termed a near public good.
A second important characteristic of a public good is that the consumption of that good by one individual does not reduce
3the amount of the good available for consumption by other indi viduals (Baxter, 1990). Thus, if one individual stands under public street lighting, the lighting is not used up, to the extent that lighting is not available for other individuals. Similarly, if one individual watches a broadcast television signal, it does not deny such access to other individuals.
The development of the cable television industry, however, changed the structure of broadcast television with respect to the public/private good differentiation. By wiring residences, the industry provided a means of denying access to television signals to some individuals, while not denying access to all individuals. The development of satellite reception dishes for residential use threatened to provide the technology to reverse this situation; however, signal scrambling enabled the produ cers of television signals to continue to deny access to some individuals, without simultaneously denying access to all indi viduals.
The result of the existence of the cable industry, with respect to the publicprivate goods concept, thus, has created some private goods where, in the past, only a near public good had existed. The television signal...