When I had cable the $30 plan was the "just the stuff you can get OTA plus some shopping channels" plan. If you wanted actual cable channels you had the choice of:
1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA
2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz, and a few more.
You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month. I think they may have had a few other premium channel options as well, but I never paid that close of attention.
We cut the cable because the price had crept up from about $50/month total to almost $100/month over the course of a few years. It was just unsustainable. Now we pay about $40/month for streaming services, and the streaming services don't have ads.
Yet. IIRC, when cable started, it didn't have ads either. It was its selling point.
Advertising is a cancer on society that infects and poisons every communication medium available. It has already metastasized to streaming platforms, though it's not conspicuous yet. You don't have to watch interstitial ads between episodes of your favorite show on Netflix, but if that show is a modern production, it's likely overflowing with product placement ads. When that and other means of making easy money get used up, you can be sure that overt ads will follow.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." And that's a salient argument in favor of torching the whole advertising industry to the ground.
When cable started, it had ads. Cable was just a bunch of broadcast stations pushed over a coax wire to your house so you could get stations that were pretty much impossible with an antenna from your location in pretty much perfect signal quality for the time. There weren't even "only cable" kind of channels when people started paying for their television to come over wires to their homes.
> You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month
Please note that that was only a channel (or two). You still had to tune to watch the movie/show you wanted! For the same price today (not even adjusted for inflation), you can watch any of this content on demand, on any device, but it has waaay more content available.
1. "Basic" bundle, $60 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you ESPN, Food Network, SciFi, Cartoon Network, USA
2. "Complete" bundle, $100 + $20 in fees + $8-15 per set to rent the box. Got you BBC, a bunch of foreign language channels, Starz, and a few more.
You could also add HBO to either plan for $15 a month. I think they may have had a few other premium channel options as well, but I never paid that close of attention.
We cut the cable because the price had crept up from about $50/month total to almost $100/month over the course of a few years. It was just unsustainable. Now we pay about $40/month for streaming services, and the streaming services don't have ads.