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Comment by efsavage | Hacker News Reader

In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...

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> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.

No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.

Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.

That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.

Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)

this doesn't ring true; TV has always been deeply linked with ads, it just seems that they moved to fractional ownership of a show via many advertisers vs. the (perhaps less intrusive) show sponsor where the advertising was woven into the plot.

I think I'm older than most HN commenters. I can't Google up a citation, but "no or fewer ads" was part of the pitch in the early-mid 1970s in my recollection. You are correct about TV and ads, so maybe I'm wrong.

Not really. Cable TV started as a better way for people to get OTA channels when they were in marginal reception areas. My family had cable TV in the 1970s and it was a maybe eight or ten OTA channels and except for the PBS station they all had commercials, between shows and during shows.

HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.

Interesting, I grew up in an area with good reception, so the pitch was definitely fewer commercials on the cable channels (HBO, Nickelodeon, MTV), I remember standing in the living room as the salesman said this. It was true for a while, but eventually they caught up to OTA ad loads.

HBO was always a premium ad free channel. MTV was never promoted as ad free.

and premium channels were ridiculously expensive back then too!

Yea, the no ads theory of the history is cable seems to be pervasive. The only ad free channels were the premium ones like HBO. It's like people think the OTA channels that were packaged together had some magic applied that eliminated ad breaks from the exact same feed as the OTA broadcast. The cable only channels like USA also had ads as well. I guess it's just another example if you tell a lie often enough people will accept it as truth

Catv originally stood for 'community antenna' and was for those who lived in a valley where tv signals couldn't reach. The community built one antenna at the top and ran a cable down to everyone. Of course it was an obvious addition after that to add extra channels.

Interesting! That makes sense now. I thought it stood for CAble TV and always wondered why they used two letters instead of just CTV.

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