four of us were talking (responsibly) over lunch.

I was pretty darn sure that a long time ago ,when Cable tv was in it's infancy , that one of the major selling point was ,
They offered tv with out commercial's.

well another guy agreed but the other two said that cable tv has always had commercial's.

Now I am wondering if different cable companies
offered different programing , some with commercial's some w/o.

any old folks remember that far back?

I don't ever remember cable TV not broadcasting commercials, except on community access channels. They were just relaying the live network broadcasts most of the time, commercials and all.

I think it may have been the beginning of HBO and the like with no commercials.

Are we talking about any channel on a given cable system? If so then yes, they've always been there.
HBO- no
WGN- yes

I am 65 and in the Lehigh Valley of eastern PA, we had one of the early cable tv companies. There were always commercials on Network TV delivered by cable. The primary advantage to cable was reliable service in hilly regions. The alternative was an Antenna Rotor. My granddad had one, it was a motor that rotated the antenna to "tune" it. Cable was better.

When it first started, ages ago, the selling point of cable tv was NO commercials.

That was the reason for paying for contents without interruptions.

You are right, bendable.

0-0

I don’t remember that. I believe my first cable hookup was in about 1970 and I paid under $10 per month. I also don’t recall what services this provided.

quote:

Originally posted by PR64:
I think it may have been the beginning of HBO and the like with no commercials.

I [vaguely] recall that being one of the selling points for HBO.

About the time they came online, network TV would show movies but with a 2 minute commercial every 12 minutes AND the movie edited down to fit into either 90 minute or 120 minute timeslot.

105 minute movie starts at 9 pm =

3 minutes of opening commercials.
12 minutes of movie (15 minutes)
2 minutes of commercials (17 minutes)
12 minutes of movie (29 minutes)
3 minutes of commercial because we're at the 30 minute mark (32 minute - 24 minutes of the movie has been shown, 8 minutes of commercial: 3:1 ratio))

HBO was looking VERY good at the time.

In the early 80's many of the channels had no commercials....stuff like MTV, HBO, etc. that I remember. However, I remember the normal stations still had commercials.

HBO, MTV, etc. did not exist yet in the early days of cable TV.
At least not around here.

In the early days of cable TV, premium channels such as HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Playboy Channel , etc. had no commercials. The retransmitted local OTA channels did. I think the superstations like Chicago's WGN did.

Well, there's cable TV, and then there are cable TV "networks". Starting around 1960ish cable TV started in earnest, but it was really just rebroadcast "network" TV, which definitely had commercials.

Long about 1970ish began the era of cable TV "networks" or channels, as in only available via cable, like HBO, C-Span, ESPN, blah blah, blah... Some of those networks/channels had commercials (ESPN), some not (HBO and the like). Re HBO: That's why you paid extra, you were compensating them for the revenue they didn't get via commercials.

Cable's Evolution

Cable had commercials when it was sending broadcast TV into your house. My grandparents had cable TV even back to the late '60s and early '70s and all the cable offered were regular broadcast TV stations for their area, just as they broadcast the signal over the air - complete with commercials. You were paying a smallish fee for not having to deal with antennas and poor signal reception.

Of course there was no HBO or anything else like that. But when it was the Philadelphia NBC affiliate (or whatever), it had commercials. IIRC, Pennsylvania was one of the first places to have any kind of cable.

HBO in the 80’s has no commercials

quote:

Originally posted by 0-0:
When it first started, ages ago, the selling point of cable tv was NO commercials.

That was the reason for paying for contents without interruptions.

You are right, bendable.

0-0

Confirmed.

Cable wasn't offered where my folks lived, but they rolled it out in town and some of my friends' houses signed up early.

At first, they called it 'pay tv' and sold it partly on the basis of not having commercials. It did not run broadcast channels at the time, at least what was available in Southwestern MI didn't.

My friends were really ticked when, years later, ads showed up.

In SW Idaho in the mid 50s to mid 60s, FM radio was largely without commercials. Then just like that, they did.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: signewt,

I'm sure for some people of a certain generation Cable = HBO because that is what first put cable TV on the radar for many people.

In 1972 while attending Jr. College, my part-time job was with our local cable company and showing recorded programs on the local cable channel from 4p.m. to midnight. Most of the shows were religious in nature. Think Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, Pat Roberts etc.

The "facility" I worked at was a small concrete air conditioned building with no windows and located outside the city limits in a cow pasture, at the base of a 525ft tower. There was no satellite reception at that time in 1972 and the tower had antennas mounted for essentially line of sight reception of broadcast and relayed stations.

I had to change a tape every half hour or hour depending on the length of the current show. There were no commercials on that local cable channel.

The cable company had incidents of more than one station from a network. For example, more than one NBC, ABC or CBS station. Most times, those multiple incidence of network stations were broadcast as received and each with commercials of their own of course. I say "most times" because one of my jobs was to program a simplex clock that worked as a switch, so that if multiple stations were broadcasting the same network show, the closest or most local stations would override the other cable channels from the same network, so that the closest or most local commercials were viewed along with the network shows. In other words, stations that filled air time with there own programs were allowed on our local cable assigned channel but when broadcasting network shows, only one close or local channel was available for view because of broadcast commercial considerations. (having a hard time explaining that for some reason). All the cable channels were still there, but one close or local channel was broadcast over all cable channels from the same network if they were all showing the same show, because of the programming of the simplex clock I had to do in consideration of commercials pertinent to our cable viewing area.

We had Comcast Tv here in Michigan. A big selling point was we pay a monthly fee and watch with out commercials. It was a distinct selling point.

I recall as a youngster, the cable TV channels that were cable only, did not have commercials. Of course the local, rebroadcast channels did, but not MTV, and the like.

We could not afford to be early adopters, but a friend's family had it. Had a lot of slumber parties trying to fine tune the soft core stuff to get a glimpse of girly parts.