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It would be an interesting case if someone tried this with the venerable TV industry: rent/borrow/buy our special HDMI cable/tuner, let us replace your ads, and we'll pay half your cable bill if you let us put our ads up instead.

Methinks the broadcasters would pounce down like a ton of bricks and their lawyers would use every loose corner of the law to bury you perpetually `a la Aereo.`

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Is this replacing ads, or just adding more?

Even if it is replacing ads, to argue that it's illegal seems to require saying that ad blocking is illegal (adblock plus has been sued for this, but so far not successfully).

Also https://brave.com/ uses basically the same technique.

I have this vague recollection that friends whose families subscribed to HBO in the 1980s said they didn't show ads at all, because subscribers were directly paying for the programming through their subscriptions (whereas free-to-air stations felt they had to run ads because viewer weren't paying directly). Was this actually true? Does anyone else have a similar recollection?

I'm just wondering if there was a particular moment when people's intuitions about where you could expect to see ads on television changed.

AFAIK this is still true of HBO.

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