There was a little while where we still had unencrypted digital cable (in the US at least). I'm sure it's still around in some places, but we lost the option y

There was a little while where we still had unencrypted digital cable (in the US at least). I'm sure it's still around in some places, but we lost the option years ago where I live. Digital cable (QAM or ClearQAM) came across the same wire as the rest of the stuff...cable internet, encrypted digital cable, etc. and you could tune it with any compatible ATSC tuner like the one built into most TVs and loads of cheap capture cards. I always hated the "digital cable boxes" required for encrypted content, but for a while, an old PC with a capture card and Windows Media Center let me have a much nicer interface and DVR without the extra rental costs. In fact, I once lived in a building that was split into three apartments and we found that as long as one of us had cable internet, we also had ClearQAM cable TV... ...which I imagine is why they got rid of it. Cable modems need to be provisioned. Cable boxes need to be rented if you want to decrypt the channels you'd paid to authorize decryption of. But QAM was just on the wire. So easy to use and so easy to mooch, so the cable company used the confusion around the switch from OTA analog/digital switch to also remove QAM and switch everyone over to those rented decoder boxes. Incidentally, it's also when I stopped watching cable TV. The boxes were an additional cost for a worse experience than I had with the built-in tuner or my HTPC. I thought about getting a new capture card with CableCard support, but that standard was a huge pain in the ass and never really took off outside of Tivo and similar turnkey devices. Thankfully, it's also when streaming and other OTT services started to take off.