Some of them are, especially movie-related ones, but special interest and news channels generally run ads now. This also isn't really relevant to my point and I

Some of them are, especially movie-related ones, but special interest and news channels generally run ads now. This also isn't really relevant to my point and I never said that cable used to be ad-free, but rather that there used to be a more prominent attraction to it due to some ad-free content offerings.