I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful:

- “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer)

- CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception.

- “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable