haha. no. cable TV started because people didn't want to see commercials.
100% fact, at least where I grew up. we had no reception problems (flat farmland) and we were one of the first houses in one of the first towns in the area to get cable service. cable company promised no commercials ever, and that's why he subscribed, after a trial period. there were zero commercials.
I remember my father on the phone with the cable company, the company that owned the cable company, our state representative, and our governor, all within a month after the first commercials started airing. obviously it did no good.
Jeez, tone down the snark? Especially if you’re going to not provide any sources. Either way, you are incorrect. Cable TV indeed started as a way for folks to get TV when reception was otherwise impossible at the home (e.g. a mountain sits between them and the broadcast antenna). Fwiw, my great-grandfather started a small (small!) cable company in rural east coast-ish mountains back in the late 50s or early 60s because they otherwise had no reception.
Per Wikipedia [0]:
“The abbreviation "CATV" is used in the US for cable television and originally stood for community antenna television, from cable television's origins in 1948; in areas where over-the-air TV reception was limited by distance from transmitters or mountainous terrain, large community antennas were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes.
[…]
The early systems simply received weak (broadcast) channels, amplified them, and sent them over unshielded wires to the subscribers, limited to a community or to adjacent communities. The receiving antenna would be taller than any individual subscriber could afford, thus bringing in stronger signals; in hilly or mountainous terrain it would be placed at a high elevation.”
Sure, that’s after cable evolved into something with enough bandwidth to the house to deliver dozens/hundreds of channels to a subscriber, not to mention the necessary distribution infrastructure on the back-end (e.g. satellite). That wasn’t the case at first. Heck, Sputnik hadn’t even launched when cable started.
