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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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I’m old enough to remember when HBO’s entire point was you paid for cable so you wouldn’t have ads. That was their business model.
Then sometime in the late 80s or early 90s (I dunno, that decade’s kind of a blur) they started sneaking ads in between shows, but not in the middle of shows. But you were paying a higher price, with a few ads. Then they started showing ads to everyone, and still making you pay. I’m still salty about that.
This was always going to happen. They’ll compound paying PLUS ads, and you’ll like it, because what choice do you have if all services are doing it?
Fuck them all . 🏴☠️
e: massively borked that first sentence
in Australia that was the whole selling point of foxtel when it launched. these days it has more ads than free to air TV and still costs like $60 a month for the basic package. most people only use it for sport
Great example , thanks! Yeah, same thing.
Paying customers attention is so fucking valuable. People pay for something, maybe if we add ads they will pay for more things!
And most people are surprisingly not bothered by ads. So... Just criminalise the people that are, and there you go, infinite money making machine.
Most cable TV channels still had ads, the revenue generated from subscribers would never have been enough to cover otherwise.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I'm right, they're wrong, deal with it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/7wxRbKq9Dj
In the early days they didn’t; that was the whole point of them. You paid a subscription specifically not to have ads like free broadcast television did.
It only lasted like a decade, but it was their whole selling point.
e: keep in mind, too, that broadcast tv at the time was where all the good content was. HBO only showed movies that had already been in theatres (thus the name Home Box Office) and Showtime’s hook was soft-core porn. (‘Do your parents have Showtime?’ was sleepover code for ‘can we watch kinda-porn after the ‘rents have gone to sleep?’) There wasn’t the dearth of original shows/movies we have now. They weren’t studios back then.
e2: sorry for multiple edits, but also bear in mind that when HBO first came out, people were watching their content on televisions like this, which was so inferior to movie theatres that ‘it’s in your home advertising free!’ was basically their whole selling point at first.
That's a false belief that keeps getting spread, cable TV started as the same channels with clear reception instead of having to rely on antennas, so no people didn't pay not to have ads, they paid to be able to watch the same channels then had access to for free but with bad reception, then some exclusive channels started appearing without commercials, but it wasn't the norm.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/7wxRbKq9Dj
And it's funny that you're talking about "the early days" since it started in 1948 and I'm willing to bet that you weren't born.
I mean, I’m not going off a belief, I actually lived this.
Yes, the clear reception vs bunny ears was awesome, but that was also limited on televisions like this, and I’m talking specifically about the content.
My family were always early adopters of technology (I started gaming in ‘79 with both the Intellivision and Atari – Intellivision was far superior). We had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime as soon as they were available.
I’m talking about the late 70s and early 80s when they were commercially available to the masses and the cable wars began.
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.
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I’d forgotten how much I should miss this.
e: also
This is what made Bob Ross a thing in the early 80s.
And before anyone screeches at me about what link said what, forget it. I'm not interested in reading text about how the 60s and 70s were supposed to have taken placeCheck any sources on cable TV history, it's all the same. Just because you decide to ignore it doesn't make it false, it just proves your ignorance.
Here, since you "don't want to read", this one has a nice graphic that should make it easy for your brain ☺️
https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/the-complete-history-of-cable-tv
Interesting fact: Did you know that historians study things that happened before they were born and it doesn't make them wrong and they don't consider anecdotes to be absolute truth because individual memory isn't reliable? Crazy right?
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.I provided a source with more sources, no it wasn't.
Need more? There:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States
First phrase:
Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948.The majority of channels has commercials, the ones you paid extra for (like HBO) didn't, they weren't the majority and the one of paying for cable wasn't too remove ads, you still had them on the majority of the channels because they were the same as what you got with antennas.
You're not the only one who lived it buddy, you just don't remember it properly.
According to the wiki article that you linked:
So basically for that first 24 years - around '1948 -'72 it was primarily used to get broadcast television to people in areas with poor reception.
Then came cable companies, producing content.. without as many commercials as OTA t.v. I wasn't born early enough to know the 70's, but did grow up with antenna television and remember being introduced to cable. First thing I noticed was that there weren't any ads at all on some channels. When I was a kid the ad free channels on my setup were 09, 10, 19, 20, 21, and some others I'm likely forgetting. I didn't actually have too many more than that, and a lot of that was filler. The ad free channels were the meat and potatoes of my experience!
So, maybe history doesn't say it was marketed that way, maybe the cable companies didn't either, I won't claim to know, but I will tell you that seeing channels without ads was a pitch on its own back then, you noticed it when you visited others homes and talked about it, others noticed when they visited out home and thought about getting it themselves etc.
Maybe it wasn't a pitch, and the whole deal, but it was damned sure a selling point.
We got reception just fine, somehow even in my rural area, what we didn't get was relatively new, commercial free movies, or titties.
How old are you?
I don’t need links to tell me what this was like when I vividly remember.
Yea, cable television first became available in 1948. Regular middle class families did not have cable television for a long time after that.
Mobile phone service was available in 1959. Guess how many people had it? A good friend of my family had a car phone in the mid 70s. Guess how common that was?
You can’t go by invention dates on stuff like this. You’ll be amazed at how long some things take to gain market acceptance.
So far I'm the only one providing sources, an anecdote of when you were a kid isn't reliable.
The majority of channels had ads because, again, they were just the same channels as without cable. Cable exclusive channels weren't a thing before 1970 (when there's was 10m subscribers already) and ads on a cable exclusive channel first started in 1977 with nearly all of them having ads in the in the 80s.
7 years of commercial free cable exclusive channels that were a minority of channels available at the time. No, people weren't paying not to see adverts and no it wasn't the point of cable TV like you said, the point of creating cable TV was to allow people to reliably watch TV by broadcasting the signal in a way that wasn't affected by all sorts of elements out of the control of the broadcasters.
Why are you so bent about this?
Again, how old are you? Do you actually remember this time? I gave one anecdote, but ask literally anyone my age and they’ll say the same. You certainly know people my age, don’t take my word for it, ask them what sleepovers were like before and after cable tv became a thing. Everyone my age remembers a massive shift, especially with Showtime.
With/without cable wasn’t an easy change. Lots of people didn’t accept it easily because it seemed technically complex. That’s part of why my family was an early adopter: my dad was an aerospace engineer, so it was a no-brainier.
The televisions sold in the late 70s were not set up for cable, so you needed a cable box and to configure your tv a certain way – typically by setting one of your two dials to channel 2, 4, or I think UHF 12 (?it’s been a while, but it depended on your tv, and you’d have an auxiliary dongle, too), you had to plug a cable box into your tv (which was nowhere near as simple as now), and then maybe sacrifice a goat. I joke, but the wiring out of the back of those things wasn’t easy. It wasn’t clear ports with matching inputs, but more like in the back of old school audio speakers, but more of them.
That doesn’t sound hard, but for most people the tv was a magic box that pictures came out of. These were your grandparents, they weren’t good at technology.
In the late 80s, yeah. That’s after what I’m talking about. It sounds like you’re talking about the era of Nickelodeon and the height of Showtime/Cinemax porn. I’m talking about more than a decade before that.
Yes, by that point, cable had settled into the subscription + ad model I’m saying was the down slide. I’m talking about way before that, when it hadn’t yet devolved.
Again, I’m not making this up, and I kinda wonder what you think my motivation would be to do so, but I’m very curious how old you are and if you’re just going on things you’ve read or if you were alive for this.
e: clarification
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I was a weird nerd, and some of my fondest memories are helping my dad do engine work on our wood-sided station wagon (I was such a cliché) and going with him to the tv shop to pick up vacuum tubes for the tv after a loud pop and faint waft of smoke, then shimmying ass-upwards on the wall like spider man to hold the flashlight at the correct angle whilst my dad pulled the particle-board (I think, maybe cardboard) back off the television and taught me what every single part inside did.
Best time of my young life, hands down.
e: I’ve never been afraid of technology or learning things in my adult life. Thanks, dad.
(And if you’re raising your child like this, thank you. You’re helping to make good people that way.)
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Oh yeah! Exactly! Mine was very similar to this, but a bit narrower. It was a behemoth, plus the cord was very short.
Thus the shimmying ass-upwards to hold the torch. There was scant space back there, and making more was work.
I think you’re right. It was a dark, dense, and very thick board, but not actual wood. I had a radio or clock or something with the same backing, now you mention it. I hadn’t paid much attention except it was thicker than the ikea shit, lol.
Wait, what? I completely missed that growing up.
Brb.
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Christ on a bike, don’t say shit like that to me – my house was built in 1886. O.o
Just keeps getting worse from there. Some outlets in this place have seen all the world wars.
There are more efficient ways to give me a heart attack, you know.
I think you’re right. I was sticking around for the next volley of meme-facts, but it looks like the match has been called. :)
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BTW, I think your detractor is probably too scared to take me onYou sound just like a COVID denier, hope you realise that? "My experience is true, people who researched the subject and found sources from those in the industry are wrong. Let me show you with anecdotes instead of sources to back my point!"
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Your link literally states you're wrong...
No, because the majority of TV channels you got when getting cable weren't cable exclusive, cable exclusive appeared in 1972 (24 years after the introduction of cable broadcasting) and in 1977 came the first cable exclusive channel with ads.
People saying "not having ads was the point of cable" are wrong since not having ads on all the cable exclusive channels was a thing for 5 years and only happened after cable already had a good fooothold in the market.
You've already changed the goal posts. Your initial claim was that most cable networks had ads, and now you've walked that entirely back to "well there existed one channel that had ads"
But also the original comment was they were old enough to remember it
And if you look at this timeline: https://www.computertechreviews.com/a-brief-history-of-cable-tv-commercials/
It lines up pretty well with their claims of when ads were during the viewing experience.
I didn't move the goal post, most of the channels you got access to when subscribing to cable were the same channels you had access to without cable and they had ads, a minority of channels, starting in 72 with HBO, which was the first cable exclusive channel, didn't have them but in 77 the trend reversed.
That's 5 years without ads on a minority of channels you could watch and people speak like all cable was ad free and like that was the whole point of it. Well, no, the whole point was to get TV to people who didn't have good reception and the people here ignore the 24 years of cable TV that came before 1972 and the 46 years since 1977.