Hacker News Reader

Old man yelling at clouds here. These same arguments were brought up with cable TV back in the day; one of the benefits of cable TV, we were told, was there wouldn't be any ads since we were paying for it.

"There's nothing new under the sun"...

View on HN

> one of the benefits of cable TV, we were told

Who told you that? Cable TV had ads on practically every channel for the first 30 years of its history, since it was just collecting and transmitting all the local broadcast stations. And even when cable-only stations came out, they often had ads. The second cable-only TV station, TBS, had ads from day one!

HBO was an outlier because it didn't have ads. It wasn't the norm.

I pre-date cable TV. There was a debate amongst the adults whether the community should allow cable TV in, given the infrastructure and tax costs involved.

Cable started in the 1950s, just so you know about pre-dating cable TV. And for the first 30 years there were no cable-only stations. So you'd then know, there were ads on cable from the start, so I don't get why you have this "we were told there would be no ads", since you saw for thirty years there were ads on it.

Yeah exactly. If I can avoid it I wont watch ads including paying more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com