Same deal here. A couple years ago we had been getting HBO for some reason. I had every intention of notifying HBO about the mix up, but was able to watch the sopranos all season. The day of the season finally, our snowbird neighbors are back in town from FLA and the cable company is muckin w/ the line to their house. Just in time for the finale, nothing but snow on the TeeVee. At that time, I had heard that the cable company could tell if a signal was being pilfered. Not sure if that was true, but they did have an "amnesty" ad campaign running for a while.

>Up until a couple of years ago, to get HBO, all you needed was to remove a filter on the outside box where the cable comes to your house. HBO was a part of standard cable and they used a filter to remove it. Many, many people just went outside and removed the filter themselves and watched HBO for free. My neighbors and I shared a single input source at one time and one of them, I don't know who, removed the filter because I found out by accident when reprogramming my tv after a storm that I had HBO. Of course the next time Time Warner came out to service someone's cable they put the filter back on. A couple of years ago that all changed (after Showtime and Starz et al came on board).
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>>>My point was simply the way broadcast licenses are done here there is a lot of marketing and packaging of programming with different commercial arrangements. ( though it could be argued what we actually have is 4 BBCs and then 400 channel 4s. ) In fact, of course, the major networks all own networks in the higher channel numbers where they get more mileage from products originally developed for the major network so the syndication game is very much in flux as well. So while it looks like there are a lot of channels there aren't a lot of owners of channels.
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>>I'm quite amused with the fact that I have to pay to watch something with advertisements. If it's already paid for, i.e. time sold, why should I pay for it again?
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>>I wouldn't mind paying a dolar or two per channel a month, or maybe $.50 an hour to watch whatever I want, without ads. I mean without ads. That means not even self-advertising - I don't care what are you showing in the next five hours, you don't have to shout it at me, I can read the schedule from the web, thank you.
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>>The recent claim that the TV series may be dead soon because people don't want to watch ads, so if people would please watch them so we can keep them alive - is anywhere between ridiculous, false, moronic and outright rude, IMO. When was the last time they tried without ads? When was it they last tried to make money by collecting subscription only? I don't count HBO, because 1) they self-advertise a lot, 2) you can't take one channel, you always must buy the bundle.
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>>Why bundle, afraid of the market?