When television was new, Hollywood saw it as competition for their movies. Theater owners were even more impacted, as they made no money at all if people stayed home for entertainment. But advertisers loved TV, since it was a way to feed their sales pitches directly to consumers, and programming was just a way to get them to tune in. But then came cable TV. Most of us didn’t get cable TV until the 1980s, but HBO launched in 1972 in one town in Pennsylvania. However, the concept goes back to the 1960s. It’s strange to think about now, but that concept was that we would pay to have TV brought to our homes, and there would be no advertising on it.
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That idea was horrific for advertisers, none more so than ad executive Don Belding of Foote, Cone, and Belding. He headed up a California ballot initiative to ban pay TV with a campaign called “Save Free TV” in 1964. Subscription TV was only in the testing phase at the time, but the very idea was enough to galvanize advertisers and theater owners. And the public, because of the brilliant slogan. No one wanted to give up free TV! And so the ballot initiative was successful. But California -and the rest of us- got pay TV service anyway, so you need to read the rest of the story at Tedium.
Source: neatorama