Have you ever seen cable TV abbreviated “CATV?” That’s because the original original pitch for it was as “Community Antenna TV,” wherein it would receive local over-the-air broadcasts and then send them over a wire to folks who couldn’t receive them properly because they lived behind a mountain or whatever.
The second pitch was getting original content on cable-only channels, but because your subscription was helping pay to license it (unlike the over-the-air channels, which they – at least initially – got for free), they would be ad-free.
Of course, nowadays cable companies have been made to pay retransmission fees to broadcast TV networks and cable-only channels are showing ads too, so both content sources are double-dipping revenue streams.
(Side note: that link is to a site trying to sell some kind of service, so ignore the last part of the page – the explanations at the beginning of it are quite good, though.)
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Yes, it could be argued it was the pitch, much like Netflix originally was. It’s actually kind of wild how the streaming services are literally following the same path as cable television.
thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Wow, I had no idea. I didn’t even really know that cable was at one time the fancy premium version of TV.
One thing I think we can say though is that a big part of why Netflix was disruptive was the promise of watching uninterrupted-- No ads. So even though folks thought “of course cable has ads, that’s the norm,” they also flocked to services that provided ad-free alternatives.
I’m always surprised when I see someone just sit through a YouTube ad or something, instead of beating their chest and screaming “WHERE uBLOCK? HOW ADS?” which alarms the neighbors but they’re used to it at this point (which is what I do)… But it’s encouraging that people still voted with their feet by dropping cable as soon as a less extractive experience emerged. It gives me hope that the endgame of enshittification is irrelevance.