I'm not as old as some here, but there were always commercials when I was a kid.

However, I'm old enough to remember becoming an expert at crawling under the house and installing splitters to send the signal to every TV in the house, lol. I was young enough I didn't know it was pirating until years later, when I was in my late teens. Mom never mentioned that when sending me into the Radio Shack...

Cable tv has always been commercial free. I first got in 1983 (paid for it myself as a child). HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, now Starz, EPIX, Encore, all commercial free. The only thing I watch on cable (satellite) is commercial free channels.

I guess I interpreted Cable TV to mean channels like ESPN, Turner, etc. Never have seen commercials on the paid per channel sites like HBO, but these days I interpret cable TV to be everything I get when I pay my cable bill.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
Cable tv has always been commercial free. I first got in 1983 (paid for it myself as a child). HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, now Starz, EPIX, Encore, all commercial free. The only thing I watch on cable (satellite) is commercial free channels.

Cable TV first started in about 1948, and it was not commercial free. There were only a few markets - parts of eastern Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Arkansas. These were places that were relatively far from broadcast antennas and mountainous. Over-the-air reception was terrible, so cable brought TV to the coal regions of Pennsylvania where they couldn't receive the signal from Philadelphia. Obviously, there was no HBO, Cinemax, etc. until the middle and later '70s. Prior to the advent of the pay TV services like HBO and MTV, cable stations just fed local TV to your house. As I said, my grandparents in Bethlehem had cable in the late '60s and is was broadcast TV only, just brought in by cable.

Yes, that was a selling point when we first got cable tv. There were channels that weren't available via major networks that had no commercials. No one cared that there were still commercials in the network TV channels because you got 30 channels of clear tv rather than 3 fuzzy channels.

Got cable when it came to town in the seventies and there were commercials just like today on the regular channels.

HBO and etc required you to rent a filter...
I knew a cable service tech that would declare a filter "bad" and replace it with new one. He then sold the perfectly fine, so called "bad" filters for ten bucks. I don't know how long he got away with it.

When I was a kid my Dad was an engineer and designed and oversaw Cable TV installations in 8 States. The only channels that were commercial free were the local access channels. The networks were all as they are today. There were only the 3 networks back then. My Dad designed approximately 400 cities Cable, from Oklahoma to North Carolina.