6-12 ft. C-band satellite antennas that piggybacked on unencrypted programming traffic certainly existed. My neighbor had one and I did some research but decided it wasn't worth the effort /money when I moved in. Whatever broadband cable company did eventually wire me up a few years later; this was in the late 90s. And I'm about 40 miles west of Boston.

Maybe revisionist but what most people think of as "cable" was broadband cable (maybe DirecTV, launched 1994) with lots of commercial channels. They don't think of having a 12 foot antenna scouring the sky for signals.

There was certainly some earlier cable, e.g. HBO, if you could pickup broadcast, that predated channels like CNN.