Television viewers are often faced with complicated wiring requirements for integrating the various signal sources into their systems. This situation was made worse in part by the Federal Cable Regulation Act of 1992, which caused some cable systems to discontinue carriage of local Broadcast stations that insist on receiving a per-subscriber fee to allow retransmission of their signals. As a result, cable subscribers on these systems must provide their own antennas in order to receive signals from these broadcast stations.
With the availability of signals from direct-broadcast satellites, many consumers will consequently have three different signal sources to choose from when viewing, with the added confusion that all three of these sources may provide channels with the same numerical designation. A further complication is the integration of cable converters with the public switched telephone network, for billing special event programming and various other pay-per-view schemes.