When cable TV came out, there were three compelling improvements over broadcast TV. The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast cond

When cable TV came out, there were three compelling improvements over broadcast TV. The picture was excellent, no interference from over-the-air broadcast conditions. There were no commercials, naturally, or what would have been the point to begin with? Plus it was not regulated by the FCC. It's no surprise without these incentives, people have been looking elsewhere for quite some time. Then when HBO came out, cable was still in its younger stages. HBO did not have enough material licensed to fill up a weekly schedule at all. It was only full-length movies to begin with, that's why they called it Home Box Office. They only ran a handful of movies a week, repeated often according to a published schedule. It was pretty cool since you could watch the end of a movie later in the week in case you didn't finish it the first time it showed. Watch the whole thing a few times if you wanted. It was accepted that HBO was just starting out, and they said eventually they would have full weeks of programming, and that the often-repeating short playlist would eventually be filled with different movies all week or at least one day at a time. That turned out to be false. Before they even got to a half-full schedule, additional content then began to appear on an additional new channel called HBO2. Which you could subscribe to in addition to "regular" HBO.