Kinda showing my age here....

My dad was "that dad" back in the 90s and 00s. You know the one. He always knew some guy with some stuff that maybe fell off a truck. He was a tree climber at the time (tree surgeon, really. To this day in his late 60s, for all his faults, the man is an artist with a chainsaw), and he would use his climbing gear to climb the poles and hook up cable for people he knew, for free. One day during the late Clinton administration, he came home from the flea market with about 30 black market cable boxes. We, and everyone we knew, had free everything from then on. Got every channel, including the porn channel. You could lock it out with a pin code, but in my parents used the same code for everything, so we knew it. I watched so much fucking porn it was insane. I think I was the only kid around that wasn't super impressed by the quantity of internet porn when that became a thing.
I was impressed with the existence of gay porn, though. Haha. Stupid porn channel had no gay porn, I had to settle for the 1/3 of a second of dick before it went into her mouth
- You must have been av very popular kid in your neighborhood.
  
  Kind of. The only TV's that had it were the living room and my parents bedroom, so we had to make sure no one was home haha
  
  Typo intended or not?
- You reminded me of the massive amount of "Dad gets free cable with his little black box" commercials as a kid.
  
  I don't know those! Link?
- Haha, yeah we had one of those cable boxes too and also used the switch box thing that would switch between the 1-60 and 60-120 channel range at one point. Fucking with analog devices was fun times.
  I wasn't big into the cable porn though (I watched a lot of HBO standup on the box) cause I also grew up learning how to navigate warez sites and having to dodge porn popups (not always of course lol) to get my 52 part-zip files, each 15mb piece hosted on a different free geocities account, to recombine into GTA 1 and pray the link to piece #45 wasn't broken, lol.

Once I went on holiday in Europe as a young teen. The hotel room had a tv with like 2-3 free normal channels and extra channels including porn that you could access if you called the front desk and gave them credit card information. I definitely wasn't going to do that since I didn't have a credit card and this room was booked in my parents' names, however the whole reason I knew about this was because I was flicking the through the normal channels simply because I was bored and I accidentally flipped past the porno channel. You weren't supposed to be able to see anything on there because they want you to pay up for that so when you land on this channel you're presented with some kind of teletext on black screen saying something like call reception to access with a phone number or something, however, when you first flick to this channel, it takes a little while to kind of tune in to it before it displays the teletext and as it tunes in it looks just like the image from this post before instantly clearing in to a complete picture and you get about 1 almost 2 seconds of whatever porn was showing at the time and then the paywall. So being pretty desperate, obviously I flicked up past the channel and back down again to get my 1-2 seconds of porn and did this repeatedly over and over again. Funnily enough, I would have been content with this uncomfortable viewing arrangement but after doing this in a rhythm for a while I noticed that sometimes you'd get 1 second or sometimes 2, or sometimes even like a full 5 seconds or more and this would happen in no particular order of successive channel flips when then suddenly it just flicked on to the channel permanently with no interruption. I have no idea why that happened but this image definitely reminds me of that. Funnily enough I didn't really take advantage of this luck because I was so shocked by that suddenly happening and so worried it might get billed to the room anyway that I just flicked away from the channel and turned it off.
- I don't think the TV was the only thing being "flicked" that evening.
  
  Will it actually kind of was ironically. I was going to try and make a go of it, but I was immensely worried I'd be caught in the act and having to maintain the channel flipping with the remote made things awkward too. When it suddenly tuned in consistently I thought I'd hit the jackpot but then I got so worried I'd leave evidence I flicked away from the channel again before I could really you know, get anything out of it.

Every once in a while the cable company where I lived would unscramble it at random times, and it always felt like Christmas came early lol

I had a TV capture card in my computer and a little program that could in a sense decode the signal. However it wasn't very good at it. It had hotkeys to fiddle with the parameters, because a lot of them weren't constant in the encoding, but varied over time. This meant readjusting them all the time, otherwise it would lose tracking and get messed up. The colors would also invert every 30 secs or so, so you would need to hit a hot key to toggle that. Also there was no sound, the encoded TV stations used a digital sound track instead of the regular analog one, and nobody had figured out how to decode that. And because computers weren't that fast back then (I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz), the resolution was only half what the signal was. The signal was 480i, which got turned into a 240p image. Which at double the pixel size was still a very small image.
But it was kinda neat it could at least decode some of it and boobs could definitely be seen :) Funny how that's 25 years ago, it feels like it wasn't that long at all.
- We had something similar in Germany but apparently the "encryption" was much worse. The audio was unencrypted and the image was complete with just the lines being jumbled around. So if you had a key file with the correct order for the lines and a capture card you could watch it for free.
  They had all the new movies earlier than other TV channels and some porn at night. As far as I recall I only used it to watch one movie. Not One Less. A great Chinese movie about a substitute teacher in a poor rural town fighting to get a kid who left to work in the city back to school.
- I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz
  Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.
  For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.

I think I can see a nipple

I SAW A BOOB! .... there! ... wait! .... there it is! ... right there! ... I saw it!!!

Kids today can see tits in 4k whenever. Does that makes them better or worse?
- It makes them ungrateful.
  
  They will never get the joy of finding porn in a bush.
- I grew up in the 80's, 69% of the movies had a sex scene with some titties.

I was a bad 30 yr old

- "Failed to load media"

My grandparents had cable and one of those old cable boxes from the 80s with the wood grain. I found out if I stuck a letter opener in juuuust so.. unscramble all the things.

Can someone explain what's going on here?
I mean I understand that they're watching a smut channel, but technically what's going on? How was it possible to do this?
(born after cable era)
- Before peeps had access to internet and whatnot, you could tune into the scrambled porn channel and watch the scrambles for a while. Occasionally, it would unscramble enough to be able to see the sex stuff!
  
  Yeah, I have had cable, I meant what's the technical thing going on here. What's this scrambling/unscrambling stuff.
  Were these porn channels illegally broadcasted? If it was scrambled how would the intended viewers watch it?

What channel is this?
- In the US, it was probably called "Preview." It was an over-the-air movie channel that needed a decoder box to view it.
  They usually broadcast from a UHF TV station that had made a deal with HBO or CineMax (often nicknamed "Skin-a-Max" because they tended to show pron after 11pm or so). It was basically cable TV without the cable.
  
  That's a new one, kids called it "paper view" when I was growing up. It's pay-per-view, and you could get it on cable and satellite too.