Back in 2005 or 2006, I had purchased a cable-ready QAM PCI Tuner card. When I scanned channels, I saw a number of very high numbered channels that all appeared empty of content.

One day, I was flipping through the channels, I hit one of the high number channels, a relatively newly released movie was playing on it. I started watching it for a bit and the video paused for a second and then it started rewinding.

It took me a few seconds to realize that the Video on Demand service was being transmitted in the clear on these high number channels and the people's STBs were programmed not to see them. With the PCI card though, I could see any VoD being played on my local "circuit".