HBO

HBO began selling a monthly subscription for uncut films over cable systems in 1972 and moved to satellite distribution in 1975, which made a national network possible. It carried no advertising, so its revenue came entirely from subscriber fees shared with cable operators, and that let it commission The Sopranos and the series that followed without ratings pressure on any single night. Programming is a fixed cost recovered across the whole subscriber base, which is the economics readers should take from it, along with what happened when Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery each changed the strategy around streaming. Gillette and Koblin wrote the full history through the Max era, and the earlier account covers the founding and the cable years.

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