History
HBO first created this concept when the network was on 14 systems in New York and Pennsylvania by 1973 (a year after its launch) and the subscriber churn rate was exceptionally high. Subscribers would sample the service for a few weeks, eventually becoming weary of seeing the same films, and then cancel their subscription. HBO struggled because of this and something had to be done. When HBO first signed on in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the idea was to allow subscribers to preview the service for free on channel 3. After a month, the service moved to channel 6 and was scrambled. The preview proved popular, obtaining many subscriptions.
Soon after, HBO and other premium cable services began offering occasional free previews of their services in order to entice cable customers into subscribing to that specific service. These free previews usually lasted three days from Friday to Sunday (which in recent years, has changed to Friday to Monday four-day free previews, with some cable providers even offering five-day previews in rare cases), airing on the weekends when people who tend to work or attend school during the week are more likely to watch. The free previews offered each premium service to be observed as is, with no editing whatsoever, this allows programming with graphic violence, nudity, sexual content and/or coarse language to be openly broadcast in homes subscribing to the participating systems (and allowing the possibility of children to observe such content if channel blocking is not activated) since these free previews usually aired on local origination channels on basic cable and on satellite, the premium services would be descrambled to broadcast these programs.
Celebrity hosts were sometimes used for these free previews during the 1980s. Many cable systems offered additional incentive to get people to subscribe to premium services such as offering prizes and free trips. One such example was Cox Communications, which for several years broadcast "free preview updates", which featured promos, prize giveaways and behind-the-scenes information in-between programs, from Walt Disney World in Orlando before moving to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 1999. These updates commonly offered prize giveaways including nightly drawings to win trips to where the free preview was taking place. Other cable systems did similar things to this.
In recent years, however, the free preview concept has shifted with the increase in subscribers to a higher-tiered digital service as premium cable services now run anywhere between one to three free preview weekends per year (those that do now often air them from Friday through Monday, as previously mentioned). Most cable and satellite systems have ceased producing free preview updates for free showcases of premium channels as these previews are no longer run on local origination channels and most systems have relegated premium services to digital cable; this allows the provider to descramble each service (and their respective multiplex channels, should they operate one) to air the specific free preview schedule(s) with that network's promo breaks inserted between programs. Some video-on-demand services, pay-per-view sports packages and select basic channels available on higher subscription tiers also occasionally offer free previews, sometimes for as long as one to two weeks.
Read more about this topic: Free Preview
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