Once upon a time---perhaps when cable television was still a novelty and subscribers had to pay a separate fee for every TV hookup in the home---coaxial cable was the province of "the cable guy." Times change, and so do the laws and the technology that you live with. Today, when you are allowed to split a signal among multiple TVs or network disparate tech devices like computers and Internet telephones, coax cable has become a commonplace and convenient way to leverage the latest advances in consumer electronics.
The Cable
Most of us are familiar with "coax," as it's known. It puts the "cable" in cable TV. Fatter than most hookups around the house, it's distinguished by a thin wire at its center. That wire in turn is wrapped in a layer of insulation, then a grounded protective shield and finally an outer wrapper of black or white insulation.
The cable service provides a single coax to the home, usually slithering through a wall near your principal television. A connector on the cable's end, the thin wire at its center, mates with an antenna terminal on the TV. That connection is your starting point for multiple cable connections.
The Splitter
Unscrew or slide off the cable connection to the TV-antenna terminal. Push or screw the TV connector onto the input-terminal of a splitter. As its name suggests, a splitter divides a single digital signal into multiple identical ones. A small, rectangular device, available at most electronics shops, the basic splitter has a single input terminal and two, three or four output terminals.
Connect the cable you removed from the TV to the input terminal on the splitter. Put a new cable of the appropriate length on any one of the splitter's output terminals and hook the coax's other end to the TV-antenna terminal, restoring your earlier cable-TV installation. Hook a second new cable to another output post on the splitter.
If you're simply splitting the television signal, run the second output cable to a second TV's antenna terminal.
If you're tapping into services like broadband Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, connect that second cable to a modem's antenna post. In turn, the modem's output ports will route the divided signal over telephone and computer cabling to the appropriate devices.
Tags: antenna terminal, input terminal, output terminals, second cable, thin wire, thin wire center, TV-antenna terminal