What you got to what a set up for why that view ("seems") was wrong. You wrote "Ads have been around forever" A few paragraph later, which you didn't get to,

What you got to what a set up for why that view ("seems") was wrong. You wrote "Ads have been around forever" A few paragraph later, which you didn't get to, the author says: > This is both a new crisis and an old one. When television began, it was a live medium. Replicating radio, it was not merely supported by admen; it was run by them. In TV’s early years, there were no showrunners: the person with ultimate authority was the product representative, the guy from Lysol or Lucky Strike. Beneath that man (always a man) was a network exec. ... > Advertisements shaped everything about early television programs, including their length and structure, with clear acts to provide logical inlets for ads to appear." ending up with: > This sponsor-down model held until the late fifties, around the time that the quiz-show scandals traumatized viewers: producers, in their quest to please ad reps, had cheated. Both economic pressures and the public mood contributed to increased creative control by networks, as the old one-sponsor model dissolved. You write: "Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years." The author's starting point is from before pay cable. ("Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet".) As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United... point out, that was nominally the late 1940s, but 'Original programming over cable came in 1972 with deregulation of the industry.'