Mitch,
Have you ever heard of FTA satellite TV? FTA = Free To Air. It is broadcast in both C and Ku band and once you have bought the equipment, you pay nothing more, ever. No subscriptions, no club dues, no equipment rentals, etc. Hence it is FREE!
Unfortunately, this venue is quickly becoming a thing of the past. When I first started this as a hobby, I had somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 channels. There were some really great ones. Movie channels, documentary channels, history channels, sports channels all over the place, news programs of all sorts, playboy channels, religious channels, music channels and even radio feeds (no video - just talk and or just music). Most everyone of these has now become encrypted and no longer free. Now you are lucky to get 200 - 300 channels and most of these are all foreign news or foreign religious channels or shopping networks.
I even got CUBAVISION... That is really pretty cool! Cuba's state run TV station. I used to see Fidel Castro come on once in a while and give a speach. But on the weekends, there were movies almost all day and night - IN ENGLISH, with NO commercials and no editing and they were first rate films, too. Some of them brand new films just barely out of theaters here, some were great classics. Some of the movies were foreign films and they were broadcast in the original language, although they had Spanish subtitles below.
There were also a lot of "NEWS FEED" channels - these were AWESOME! They were raw video of on-the-scene reports of news happenings. You could see the reporter setting up his gear, rehearsing his/her lines, doing audio tests, cracking jokes or doing really dumb things. These feeds were broadcast live up to the satellite via a dish truck, then back down to the newsroom where they recorded them and edited them. You could capture that live signal on its return path back to earth to the newsroom and see it LIVE! before any editing was done. These were my favorites.
Before I moved away from the farm in 2012, I had eight fixed and one motorized satellite dishes in my yard and was watching signals from 35 different satellites. Currently I don't have any of them set up anymore. They are all sitting in storage, jsut waiting to get back in service.
This was just a hobby - a pastime that my brother and I got into together. We really didn't watch any more TV. It was just a game to see how many satellites and channels we could actually pull in for free. So we spent our time (instead of watching the telly) aligning and tweaking our satellite dishes and experimenting with new satellite recievers, equipment, test instruments and signal meters and cables, etc. By the time I had to quit buying new toys for this hobby, it turned out that it really wasn't FREE after all. I may have spent $10,000 over the course of 10 years on equipment just to play with. That made it comparable to the standard satellite TV costs today, but I got ALL the channels for free until the last couple of years and that would have cost you about $300 per month back then.
I very much enjoyed it though. Not for watching TV because I don't like to sit in a chair for very long. But, it was something that allowed me and my brother to do together that required skill and technical knowledge and hands on training and construction.
Here is a story about one of the news-feeds my brother and I stumbled upon one night while playing with our satellites at his cabin. We were just surfing channels on a night when there happened to be a space shuttle launch and ran across a video showing a guy setting up equipment with the camera aimed towards the launch area. There was a number on the screen that kept scrolling across and it looked like a telephone number with the words: Truck 1 - Ray. We decided to call it just to ask some questions and when we did, the guy walked over to his bag and pulled out a cellphone and voila! I was talking to the guy on the TV! When he answered I was actually a bit shocked and didn't know exactly what to say so I just blurted out... "Looks good, Ray, I can see the pad perfect!" and then I hung up. He pulled the phone away and held it down to see the screen for a moment, then looked into the camera rather confused like and then went about his setup chores.
Gordy
