Yes, it could be argued it was the pitch, much like Netflix originally was. It’s actually kind of wild how the streaming services are literally following the same path as cable television.

Here’s a New York Times article from 1981 about it:

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html

Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers’ monthly subscription fees. These days, however, as cables are laid across the country and new programs constantly pop up to fill the gaping maw, cable experts are talking as glibly about the potential advertising revenues as they are about opportunities for programming.

‘‘The floodgates for advertising on cable are down,’’ says Michael Dann, a leading consultant on cable television. Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.

Also, I’ll just point out that people in here not knowing about this literally proves my point that if the changeover happened before you were born/early in your childhood, you’ll just accept the change as “the norm” because you never knew anything different and had no reasons to question it. It’s not about the intelligence of any generation of kids, it’s just an inherent part of not knowing what happened before you were born, which is something every human experiences. It takes dedicated effort to find out that “the norm” isn’t “the norm,” for anyone. Also, on the flip, we’re not particularly special for figuring out “the norm” isn’t “the norm.”

Have you ever seen cable TV abbreviated “CATV?” That’s because the original original pitch for it was as “Community Antenna TV,” wherein it would receive local over-the-air broadcasts and then send them over a wire to folks who couldn’t receive them properly because they lived behind a mountain or whatever.

The second pitch was getting original content on cable-only channels, but because your subscription was helping pay to license it (unlike the over-the-air channels, which they – at least initially – got for free), they would be ad-free.

Of course, nowadays cable companies have been made to pay retransmission fees to broadcast TV networks and cable-only channels are showing ads too, so both content sources are double-dipping revenue streams.

(Side note: that link is to a site trying to sell some kind of service, so ignore the last part of the page – the explanations at the beginning of it are quite good, though.)