History

HBO was born on November 8, 1972. The first progamme to be aired on HBO was a New York Rangers vs Vancouver Canucks game and that same night a film was shown, "Sometimes a great Notion".
On September 30, 1975, HBO became the first TV network to continuously deliver signals via satellite when it showed the "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. On December 28th 1981, HBO expanded its schedule to 24/7, the last one to do so out of Cinemax, The Movie Channel and Showtime.
In January 1986, HBO became the first satellite network to encrypt its signal from unauthorized viewing and in 1993 became the world's first digitally transmitted television service. In 1999 HBO became the first national cable TV networks to broadcast a high-definition version of its channel, something which can be seen on other networks such as discovery channel to this day.

In the late 1980s, HBO launched a short lived channel, Festival. It aired classic movies and current hit movies as well as HBO's specials & documentaries. The difference with Festival however, was that it was programmed to be family-friendly. R rated movies were toned down and edited for showing. Also, the subscription for the channel was priced lower than HBO & Cinemax. Unfortunately, only a few cable systems gave Festival a chance and the channel began to die out in a year or so.

In 1991, HBO and Cinemax became the first premium services to offer multiplexing to cable customers. Providing multiple options of HBO and Cinemax instead of just single channel services, these include (HBO plus) and Cinemax (Cinemax 2, now MoreMax) to three cable systems. The move proved successful resulting in HBO and Cinemax launching additional multiplex channels of its service, HBO signature (launched in 1995), HBO Family (launched in 1996), HBO Comedy & HBO Zone (launched in 1999) and HBO Latino, (launched in 2000. Cinemax also launched the multiplex services Cinemax 3 (launched in 1996, ActionMax in 1998), ThrillerMax (launched in 1998) and WMax, @Max, OuterMax and 5StarMax (all launched in 2001). The two packages then merged into "HBO/MAX Pak", but are no longer referred to under one name.