Lavarock, I recall buying the poor mans package from the cable company back at the turn of the century for $20 a month. It was mostly just OTA stations. When cable first went digital it saved them all kinds of money transferring or delivering the data and they raised their price and even made more money off us. Very glad I am able to use that magic antenna and that most stations are on UHF.
Better still: Many dcades back, I had a home satellite dish. This was novel because the public generally didn’t, but I was a Ham and technical. My first one was a patio mount which had aluminum rods you adjusted for height and angle. I watched news directly from the network feeds. Also, most signals were in the clear, including HBO which shut down at midninght east coast time, WTBS, Showtime, The Movie Channel, etc. They soon decided to start encrypting signals but you could subscribe t oservices.
When I moved to Georgia around the time of the Olympics, I installed a bigger dish with actuator (think driveway gate fence closure thing) which would adjust the mesh antenna along the path as I changed channels. I was able to watch many channels all for free. In the end, I was able to watch hundreds of channels and even subscribed to many of the pay services: HBO, Showtime, TMC, WTBS, WGN and so on, also getting the wst coast feeds thrown in. That allowed you to watch a movie or show that just finished airing on the east coast. I also got raw news feeds before they wwre edited by the networks, I saw Star Trek, Newhart, The Wonder Years, etc. I had multiple news channels of the OJ trial which showed inside the courthouse, people in the hall outside, outside the courthouse itself and so on (it was like being there). I saw first hand how the news networks manipulated a story to get it on air.
All this stuff for about $350 a year! You could get all the free stuff, then pick and choose ala-carte or by packages, what channels you wanted to add. I wish I could find the old ads from the satellite magazine that showed what you got for next to nothing.