We had Continental Cablevision in Ohio in 1986. My dad picked up a few cable filters at the Hamvention in Dayton. Those filters unscrambled HBO and the Disney Channel for us. Back then, Disney Channel was a nice premium service that aired a lot of movies, not what it is today!
I remember Continental Cablevision back in the 80s. Only 36 channels. We black boxed our service in the 90s during the Viewers' Choice era of Pay-Per-View. But, back in the 80s, we were legit. Premium was HBO, Cinemax, Disney Channel, and the local RSNs (NESN and Sports Channel).
My parents had but got rid of Cinemax because as I young kid. I had a habit of falling asleep around 7:00 in the evening and waking up at 2:30 in the morning. With 36 channels it was quite easy for me to pass Cinemax with it's late night content. I still remember that it was channel 16. And, I was young, like before school age young. So Cinemax went, and my parents switched to HBO, which had less adult content at night, and just content that my parents my want to screen. Why not just drop premium movies? Well, perhaps what I share next might explain my parents' mind mindset at the time.
They didn't want to pay for everything under the sun, so the options they decided to make for themselves was it's either HBO (as Cinemax was out of the discussion) the sports pack, and/or Disney Channel. Since they liked movies and my father was an avid Hockey fan (Bruins were on NESN and the old Hartford Whalers were on the New England area's Sports Channel), the sports pack was a must. So, I never got Disney Channel until we started using the black box in the 90s, and by then I just grew out of Nickelodeon, so I didn't care about Disney.
So, as I kid, the one channel that would have grabbed my attention was scrambled. I wound up spending most of those over nights watching MTV.