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.