[dragonwriter]

> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.

No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.

Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.

[flyinghamster]

That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.

[dragonwriter]

Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)