[1827163]

And in those early days many cable providers didn't even implement the Baseline Privacy Interface, so you could sniff the entire neighborhood's downstream traffic with a modified modem or possibly even a DVB-C capable TV card.

There was literally a register bit in the cable modem MAC to enable promiscuous mode, and you could just set it: https://pastebin.com/18702Ziq

Sadly the Broadcom modem hardware I used to experiment with then seemed to lack the ability to get at the raw MPEG-TS packets, so I didn't manage to repurpose it as a TV receiver. The idea was to tune to a TV channel and stream it over multicast RTP on the LAN.

As used modems were very cheap, I wanted to have a whole bank of them, to demodulate every carrier on the CATV system. All fed into a giant, noisy 24 port 100Mb Ethernet switch that had IGMP snooping support. That was back in the 2000s...

Modem photo: https://www.usbjtag.com/jtagnt/ambit120.jpg

[drmpeg]

You would have loved the old ATI/AMD demodulator evaluation board that I have. Does both ATSC 1.0 and QAM. TS output is DVB-ASI (which requires a pretty expensive DVB-ASI to USB converter).

https://www.w6rz.net/DCP_1205.JPG