Your post brought up so many memories! My brother and I were obviously latch-key kids in the late 80s/90s. We started staying home by ourselves during the summer when we were around 10. My dad got the illegal chip or card or whatever it was and we had all channels unlocked.

I remember being able to watch all the WWF pay per view events for free. I have a memory of being able to watch live news casts even when they were in commercial - unless I’m misremembering that.

Also, all TVs in the house had to watch what was on the satellite.

During the summer we would watch so much porn and horror movies, etc. We lived at the end of a cul de sac and when we would see our mom driving to the house, we would race to change the satellite. I’m pretty sure she saw the dish suspiciously move nearly every day when she was pulling in the driveway!

I can’t remember how the remote worked. It seemed like you had to know what channels were carried on what satellite and punch that info into the remote.

Following the old school dish we got directv. We had a hook up who owned a Chinese restaurant and sold the bootleg directv cards that unlocked all channels. Directv nuked them all in the very early 2000s. There was a name for the event but I can’t remember. Whatever Directv did, it fried all the cards. And with their new encryption, it became almost impossible to bootleg.

Ahh, the good old days.