This again. Cable TV in the US from day one had ads, as it was literally just the broadcast networks which had ads repeated on a wire. So no, cable had ads fro

This again. Cable TV in the US from day one had ads, as it was literally just the broadcast networks which had ads repeated on a wire. So no, cable had ads from the beginning. Then, decades later, the first cable only stations started appearing. Some had ads from the start, some didn't. Some charged extra fees (premium channels), some didn't. Many of the early cable-only channels had ads on day one, some added ads later. In the US at least, there was practically never a time where there were no ad-supported TV channels on cable. There were always at least some channels that were ad-supported.