Why is my cable box causing interference?

WTH was with the whole cable box thing back in the day?

• OK, unless you were paying for some scrambled premium channel like HBO or Showtime, what was the purpose of cable boxes, outside of making the cable companies loot even more money from every customer? Even the older crappier TV's were capable of getting all the channels, so why deny your own TV's capability? Another lame deal was anyone that I saw who had a cable box had nothing but a layer of rolling wavy gray fuzz overlaid on their otherwise crisp signal which I proved to a buddy was the interference of his cable box, since it has to be plugged in and from my experience the more devices between any signal source and display the crappier the results. Yet people loved their cable boxes up and down. Why? Unless you had some ancient UHF/VHF TV that only went up to channel 13, or got HBO or the primo channels, you didn't need it and it made your picture crappier. I don't get it, uber-slick marketing hustle perhaps?

• Answer:

  well a lot of the people who bought the "premium" cable full of 400 some-odd channels would get a little chip-card from the cable company. that card would stick in the cable box and allow the box to uncode the signal and send it to the tv. everyone I knew that had cable boxes had cards that went in them to make them work. of course, they were "black cards" which were purchasable in mexico and much cheaper than the cable company's cards, and did the same thing. Illegal, but no one does anything about it. But the cable boxes i've seen never caused video interference. The one you saw might've been old, cheap, dirty, etc... or the connector cables were crappy or corroded- which is more likely.