HBO is launched as the first pay-TV network - November 8th, 1972

On this day in 1972, Home Box Office, or HBO, began broadcasting for the first time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that serves the channels of History seven days
a week. I'm Gabe Bluesier, and in this episode we're

(00:20):
talking about the birth of HBO, a new kind of
network that appeared in the dark days of television and
raised expectations for quality programming on the small screen. The
day was November eighty two. Home Box Office or HBO,

(00:45):
began broadcasting for the first time at a time when
cable television was still in its infancy. One of its
most prominent advocates was an American businessman named Charles Dolan.
He believed there was an audience for a premium channel
that broadcasted recent films, as well as special events like

(01:05):
live sports, stand up comedy, and concerts. Dolan took his
idea to Time, Inc. Which was looking for a way
to break into the growing cable TV business. Dolan originally
pitched the service under the working title of the Green Channel,
but once Time signed on as an investor, he and
his staff changed the name to Home Box Office Has

(01:29):
a Way to showcase the Hollywood and event programming that
would become the channel specialty Time Inc. Marketed HBO in
the same way it did its magazines, by having subscribers
pay a monthly fee for the content. In the case
of HBO, it launched with a subscription fee of about
six dollars per month. The channel kept a little over

(01:52):
half of the profits, with the rest going to Time Inc.
And the local cable operators who distributed the service. For
most of its first decade, HBO aired programming for only
about nine hours a day. It didn't switch to its
current twenty four hour schedule until as a way to

(02:12):
match its main competitor, Showtime. The first thing HBO ever
broadcast was a little known movie from seventy one called
Sometimes a Great Notion. The drama about Oregon loggers was
directed by Paul Newman, who also starred alongside Henry Fonda.

(02:33):
After that, the channel aired its first live sporting event,
an NHL hockey game between the New York Rangers and
the Vancouver Canucks. Other early event programming included three hours
of coverage of the nineteen seventy three Pennsylvania Polka Festival.
HBO subscribership took a dip that year, from fourteen thousand

(02:56):
down to eight thousand, Not that I'm suggesting Alka Fest
had anything to do with that. The truth is that
reduced subscribership was still far better than the channel's first year.
When HBO debuted in nineteen seventy two, it had only
three hundred and sixty five subscribers, all of whom lived

(03:17):
in or around Pennsylvania. This was due in part because
the channel was broadcasting its signal via microwave relays, which
are significantly cheaper than satellites but have a far more
limited range. Eventually, HBO subscriber list plateaued, and the channel
was forced to pony up for satellite distribution in order

(03:40):
to reach a broader audience. The changeover took place on
December seventy five, just in time for the landmark Thrilla
in Manila boxing match between Joe Frasier and Muhammad Ali.
The switch to satellite broadcasts allowed the channel to grow exponentially.
Just two years later, in nineteen seventy seven, the service

(04:03):
had soared to over six hundred thousand subscribers. Of course,
a major part of the channel's appeal was the rotating
selection of recent hit films that HBO licensed for TV.
At the time, the home video market was small and
growing slowly. That means a pay service like HBO was

(04:25):
a lot of people's only option if they wanted to
watch popular movies that had already left theaters. The channel
catered to this demand by scooping up the rights to
bigger and better films, but sometimes they didn't come cheap.
The cost for the rights to broadcast a movie were
based directly on how well that movie had performed in theaters.

(04:47):
The more money had made at the box office, the
more it would cost the home box office to air.
One of the pricier deals HBO made for movie rights
was the four hit ghost Busters. According to former HBO
employee Bill Messi, the channel paid Columbia Pictures a jaw

(05:07):
dropping forty million dollars for the exclusive broadcast rights. For reference,
just a few years earlier, HBO it licensed forty films
from MGM for about thirty five million dollars, but the
high price of big draw movies like Ghostbusters was ultimately
worth it. HBO continued to expand, and by the mid

(05:31):
nineteen eighties it boasted over ten million subscribers, representing about
fifty of all pay TV customers. Today, the channel has
more than ten times that amount of viewers, but blockbuster
films aren't the main draw anymore. HBO began producing its
own original films and shows in the nineteen eighties, but

(05:54):
it wasn't until The Larry Sanders Show in two that
the networks in house productions began to truly hit their stride.
The dark comedy series functioned as a parody of late
night TV chat shows, with frequent celebrity guests playing exaggerated
versions of themselves. The distinctive show drew rave reviews from critics,

(06:17):
which in turn encouraged HBO to take bigger risks on
more new shows. A string of successful original series followed,
including Sex in the City, Oz The Wire, The Sopranos,
Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Game of Thrones, to name a few.
This slate of original programming helped raise the bar for

(06:39):
television quality, ushering in what's often described now as a
Golden Age of TV. Just don't tell that to the
channel because they're still under the impression that it's not TV,
it's HBO. I'm gay, Bluesier and hopefully you now know
a little more about his street today than you did yesterday.

(07:03):
If you'd like to keep up with the show. You
can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at t
d I HC Show and if you have any feedback
or recommendations for what to watch on HBO, you can
send them my way at this Day at i heart
media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here

(07:25):
again tomorrow for another day in History class. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.