When they first came out, they were about $5,000 to $10,000...most early customers were the cable companies, so they could use a channel for HBO, and another channel for WTCG/WTBS. Or CBN, or ESPN when it first came out.
Then they became more affordable for the average Joe, in the middle 1980s. Rural viewers relied on them more than anybody else. You'll still see worn-out C-Band dishes on the prairies in MT, WY, and eastern WA even though they aren't used anymore. The days of watching a distant 10-watt VHF translator whose reception was variable day to day were over. Network feeds were clear until the early 1990s, when ABC went to Leitch scrambling, CBS went to Videocipher, and Fox also scrambled eventually. But a lot of the rural viewers subscribed to Primetime 24, which provided multiple local stations on ET/CT time; or the Denver 5. All the Denver TV stations were uplinked starting in 1987, including KWGN.
Receivers eventually had the motor that would automatically change the azimuth for another satellite, but early C-Band subscribers had to go out and rotate the dish manually!
Telstar 301, 302, 401, 402, and Westar 5, Galaxy 4, were the big "backhaul/wild feed" sats in the olden days. Galaxy 1, then Galaxy 5, had most of the cable networks (HBO, ESPN, TBS, WGN, TNT, CNN, ESPN, etc.) with others still on Satcom C4/C3. C1 was the Denver satellite. Most of those wild feeds were wide open, in the clear in those days. You could see Star Trek TNG 2-3 days before air. If you set a VCR for the middle of the night, and you were a soap junkie, the *next day's* Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives fed back-to-back for Canadian use, often with no ads. Wheel and Jeopardy fed 2 or 3 days before air. Most syndicated shows kept the national spots in the feed, and had 1-2 minutes of 'black' that the local stations would use to fill with local spots. The talk shows used satellite as did most of the weekend shows (e.g., Siskel & Ebert's movie reviews went out to satellite before the films opened in the theatres that Friday).
Sports backhauls were common on C-Band, including (sometimes) raunchy and R-rated announcer commentary during commercial breaks.
Many C-Band junkies used Satellite TV Week or OnSat Magazine for listings and wild feed times.
There were also the Morelos satellites for Mexican TV (XEW, Azteca, etc.) and the Anik satellites for CBC North, CBMT Montreal, and CBFT Montreal ALL in the clear for years and years. Several radio stations from Canada were also uplinked and with a special receiver, you could listen to them...I think in stereo too. The satellite radio formats (Jones, Starstation, ABC, and talk shows/sports feeds) also went out by C or KU, some of which were scrambled to the public.
By the early '00s, C-Band's heyday had faded. Cable networks left analog, one by one, and the wild feeds went digital, to Digicypher, and not available to the public anymore. Even the current digital C-Band feeds are being converted to fiber and nowhere near available to the general public. I think a lot of that was due to DirecTV/Dish Network.
