> Hate to tell you, but with some exceptions, most of those channels **did** 
> exists, you just had to be bloody stinking rich, or have an illegal 
> satellite unit, to watch them.

Maybe in the US.  In the UK we only got a satellite service around 1990, and 
cable TV much later which still is not popular at all.  The majority of 
people used terrestrial receivers to get the 4 available channels via 
analogue (they added a 5th, but bandwidth problems meant a lot of people 
couldn't get it properly), and recently ~50 channels via digital.

In the UK, the only channels now that existed before digital TV are the ones 
that came over from Sky, like Sky News, Sky Sports News and CNN and the 
imported Viva channel (can't see anymore on the listings that might have 
existed earlier).  All the rest (the majority) were either added as 
additions to the "big 4" analogue channels or created from scratch after 
digital TV came.

The channel list is here:

http://www.freeview.co.uk/freeview/Channels

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