You're really arguing pretty much everyone who had cable had multiple $10/mo (in the 80s and 90s!) premium channels and pretty much exclusively watched that? So

You're really arguing pretty much everyone who had cable had multiple $10/mo (in the 80s and 90s!) premium channels and pretty much exclusively watched that? So there were pretty much zero people watching CNN, there were zero people watching USA,there were zero people watching Cartoon Network, zero people watching MTV, zero people watching ESPN, etc? Only HBO and Cinemax? Those were the only channels on at every single friends house, always? > I never ever found a house amongst my friends and family during the 90's that had only basic cable. Damn, and I thought I had a privileged childhood. Many of my friends didn't even have cable despite many coming from families making into six figures in the 90s. Literally nobody you knew only had or even spent any time watching basic cable channels? Even for the percentage of those I knew who did have cable, most didn't have the premium channels or would only have HBO or only Showtime or whatever. And no, they weren't paying tons of money to only watch HBO, many of those other channels were often watched. And by the fact you're scoping it to the 90s and beyond shows you're just ignoring the 40 years of history before. > I have no hard data to back what I am going to say You don't have the data because its 100% fiction. > who I suspect was a plurality of cable users Not even close. Supposedly in May 1987 it was reported HBO had 15 million subscribers. There were 41 million cable subscribers that year. In 2001 it was reported to have 25.5 million subscribers[2]. There were 66 million cable subscribers in the US. Never, in all of cable's history, have the plurality of cable subscribers had HBO. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HBO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HBO [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United... [2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-ca-53541-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-ca-53541...