Used to have a C/Ku big dish in the back yard when I was growing up. Pretty much every channel out there was out there at the time, plus you'd get funky stuff like network live feeds and crap, you'd get to see the bloopers as they happened. I remember when FX first came online - kickass channel back then. They played all the old shit like A-Team and The Green Hornet, all unscrambled. Porn channels galore too, some of the Canadian ones were unscrambled.
Kind of fell by the wayside after a while though. It was hard to keep up with the channels, plus there was about 30 different satellites you had to keep track of, each with 24 or more channels, different polarities for each channel, and a total of 4 different bands within the C and Ku spectra. It would really suck if you had to move the dish from one horizon to the other, it took a couple minutes usually to do that. And of course, there's moving parts, so the whole thing would just die, especially in winter.
I think now pretty much anything worth watching is on the Ku band sats, and most of it is encrypted or proprietary now too.