The first movie presentation shown on the service aired immediately after the sports event: the 1971 film Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda.
Due to HBO’s humble beginnings, the inaugural transmission went off to little fanfare. The signal went out to approximately three hundred people in Wilkes-Barre, a small city in Pennsylvania. A plaque in the city commemorates the channel’s premiere broadcast of the film.
The oldest and longest continuously operating subscription television service in the United States, Home Box Office pioneered modern pay television when it launched as a microwave-transmitted regional service (initially debuting in northeastern Pennsylvania, before gradually broadening its coverage area to encompass much of the northern Mid-Atlantic and southern New England regions) on November 8, 1972, and was a leader in the development and growth of the cable television industry as the first television service to be directly transmitted and distributed to individual cable systems; the first television channel in the world to begin transmitting its signal via communications satellite