I going to take the bait, out myself as a former teenager (spoiler: I'm old) and restore thruth: the kind of movies you're thinking about were notoriously aired on Saturday nights. (At least in France.)
But I swear I was just video-taping late evening TV to get the summaries of soccer games. (Yes, video-taping. Did I mention I was old ?)
In Spain it was on Fridays, it's almost the same thing.
On soccer, ditto. There is an HN-like news somewhere, when some people broadcasted the world soccer series in ASCII over telnet around 2007 I think.
At first, maybe. But they expanded really early in the 90's to the rest of Europe.
Also it was something "for the middle-upper class". Not for a loaded guy, but for someone with some degree of freedom in order to spend your salary, such as a College guy/group living alone with no family. If you had a TV deco, for sure you have some elder brother/sister with a job or your parents were from a relatively good position.
Everything changed in the middle-late 90's, OFC, as everyone began to buy multimedia PC's so kids at home could do their homework with word processors and the Encarta. Then the Avermedia TV arrived, cracking tools were widespread and with Linux and xawtv-nagra you had a really easy and secure way to watch a record C+ with no issues, except a huge 13GB file per hour, which you encoded into MPEG/XVID for convenience.
When BT848/878 PCI TV cards arrived, a few years later everyone tried to decode C+, for two (maybe three) reasons:
- Movies.
- Sports.
- Often, music videoclips.
The TV schedule quality of that channel was light years ahead compared to the ones you could watch in almost any European countries for free.