[3] CBS Cable was a personal project of CBS founder William Paley, who hoped it would blaze a trail for cultural programming in the then-emerging cable television medium.

Nevertheless, the network struggled, and ultimately failed, largely because of the reluctance of many cable systems across the United States to give it carriage, limiting severely its ability to attract both viewers and advertisers for its costly lineup of programming.

CBS Cable was competing for channel space by appealing to a select and relatively small upscale audience, while other networks coming on line at the same time such as MTV and ESPN promised larger and more broad-based viewership and therefore got cable operators to carry them far more easily.

However the effort proved to be unsuccessful, and in 1998 CBS sold its stake in the network to Discovery Communications, which rebranded it as Discovery People before utilizing the channel slots acquired in the deal for their other networks.

The CBS Cable name was used for three years as the name of the network's cable division, after the 1996 purchase of The Nashville Network (now the general-interest Paramount Network) and Country Music Television from Gaylord Entertainment, along with CBS' existing stakes in the regional sports networks Midwest Sports Channel in the Twin Cities/Milwaukee (now split into Bally Sports North, serving Minnesota and the Dakotas, and Bally Sports Wisconsin for Wisconsin, purchased in 1992 by CBS as part of their acquisition of Midwest Television, the owners of WCCO-TV and Green Bay's WFRV-TV) and the Home Team Sports network in the Baltimore/Washington market (now Monumental Sports Network).