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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Cable also started off ad-free.

Exactly. A lot of folks forget that cable was offered as an ad-free alternative to OTA broadcast TV. The selling feature was that since you are paying for a subscription, the platform was monetized and profitable, ergo no need for ads. Sound familiar?

Cable was also started because certain areas had bad reception so they multiplexed the signals together down a single cable to avoid the reception issues.

There's a lot of competeing "cable was started" stories

There aren’t any competing stories. It’s not like the inception of cable is loss to the annals of history. There are just truths and falsehoods.

Basic cable was never ad free.

Well, I was being "friendly". Cable was never started as an ad free thing. Cable was started to get a signal to people that couldn't get a signal. That signal was the same signal as everyone receiving over the air broadcast, so it included all of the ads.

Premium cable channels came later. to quote a post up stream "Sound familiar?"

Premium cable was HBO, Showtime and Cinemax that you paid extra for and were Ad free and still is.

If by basic cable you exclusively mean network television rebroadcasts, then of course that's true, unless they were editing interesting content in on the fly.

But cable channels were ad free, and advertised as being ad free.

"Well, Pay TV is fine to see

You get much better quality:

Broadway shows, heavy-weight fights

First-run movies every night.

Viewers of Denver, unite! . . . Nothing to lose but commercials."

-- Talkin' Pay TV by Phil Ochs, 1963

Basic cable included USA, MTV, CNN, ESPN, etc.

Premium channels like HBO always cost extra and were ad free and still are on cable.

According to most articles I see, for the first 24 years after commercial cable TV was a thing, it was solely used to retransmit broadcast TV.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100905133543/http://www.ncta.c...

I knew this myth was going to be repeated as soon as I saw the parent comment.

Basic cable has never been ad free. Cable started out as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - to people who couldn’t get it over the air.

Then the “Superstations” came like TBS and WGN. They were local stations - with ads - that got transmitted nationwide.

Then the early cable TV only channels came online like CNN, ESPN, and MTV - with ads.

And netflix is adding advertisements.

I thought that but it turns out that Netflix is culturally/principally anti-advertisement. They’re caving to shareholder demand and introducing a cheaper, ad-supported plan but their regular plans are - at least for now - to remain ad-free.

To a cheaper tier to try to get people away from account sharing. I fully intend to keep the tier that I've purchased.

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