When we first had a huge dish antennae we could buy ala-cart, and wer paying only $200 a year- it was great-hot a ton of channels on it. Wish there was true ala-cart packages that we could make, but now the price would be right up there near cable prices for,premium channels for sports and such. Even without lremium movie channels like HBO, cinemax etc
I got the big dish in 1982.
Near the middle to end of the nineties there was true ala carte and you could build a package channel by channel.
But because of piracy and the advent of the little DBS dish the big C-band dish faded away.
I was an early adopter and my first equipment was primitive.
The actuator that moved the dish was actually a saginaw lift used on RVs. It used a DC motor connected to a toggle switch. To move the direction of the dish, you pressed the toggle switch up or down which reversed polarity and therefore direction. You located the satellite by picture and you had to know which transponders on which satellites were active and tune to that transponder when locating a satellite or you would just sail on by.
There were a lot a channels with a lot of different stuff on them.
In some ways it foreshadowed the internet as I became a slave to technology.
Today most folks are slaves to technology, at least those with smart phones.