HBO began with a hockey game shown to 365 homes in Pennsylvania
The channel that later gave the world blockbuster prestige dramas launched on a November evening in 1972 with a Rangers hockey game, watched by 365 cable subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It was invented to rescue a money-losing Manhattan cable system, and its founder first sketched the idea on a transatlantic liner.
Cable executive Charles Dolan ran Manhattan Cable, which started limited service in 1966 as the first urban underground cable system in the United States. It kept losing money. In the summer of 1971, crossing to France aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 and keen to stop Time Inc. pulling its investment, Dolan drew up plans for what he called the Green Channel: uncut Hollywood films and live sport, with no advertising, for a flat monthly fee. Time's board approved it that November with a 150,000-dollar development grant.
Time-Life suggested calling it the Sterling Cable Network. Dolan and his team preferred Home Box Office, a name meant to suggest a ticket to movies and events watched in your own living room. It went live at 7:30 in the evening on 8 November 1972 on Teleservice Cable's channel 21, opening with the Rangers facing the Vancouver Canucks at Madison Square Garden, followed by the 1971 Paul Newman film Sometimes a Great Notion.
HBO invented much of modern pay television. It was the first service delivered directly to individual cable systems and the template for the premium channel, sold for an extra monthly charge with no ads and no cuts. In September 1975 it became the first television channel anywhere to broadcast by satellite, turning a regional service covering parts of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states into a national one. To cut cancellations, it announced in May 1991 that it and Cinemax would add free companion channels, which then-chief executive Michael Fuchs likened to a multiplex cinema.
More channels followed, among them HBO Family in 1996, HBO Comedy and HBO Zone in 1999, and the Spanish-language HBO Latino in 2000. By 2018 it reached roughly 35.7 million American households, the most of any premium channel, and around 140 million subscribers in at least 151 countries. Its shows now anchor the HBO Max streaming service.
Source: HBO
