I remember as a kid marveling at the commercial-free cable TV offerings. My dad mumbled and grumbled that adding the 3 available movie channels drove the total monthly cable bill up to a whopping $30. Now, individual movie channels charge almost that much to give us a couple of decent shows and a few decent movies and a whole heap of tripe and filler.
They do manage to fill 200-plus stations with mostly uninteresting content. I dropped cable a while back, digital broadcast has led to a fair amount of variety.