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.)