We're a little spoiled for choice of really good channels here. If you do 'cut the cord' a small satellite dish will pick up a very large range of free to sure very high quality content mostly from the UK.
However, there is no way I'm cutting it. My 200Mbit/s internet comes bundled with cable TV and phone, so I'm stuck with it.
Ireland is a bit like Canada in so far as we are right next to a much bigger market, the UK so we have always had access to whatever is on air there too. In fact, that's what launched the cable industry here in the 1960s. Cable gave people access to 'overspill' programming that wouldn't have otherwise been accessible.
Most British channels, including BBC make themselves officially available here via pay tv platforms these days. So a chunk of your satellite TV or cable TV bill here goes to the BBC to pay for BBC 1,2,3,4 etc while Channel 4, E4 etc and most of the major commercial UK channels sell their own advertising here and broadcast an Irish version on cable / sat to gain ad revenues.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s BBC in particular used to do things like tell Irish callers to TV phone ins 'you shouldn't be watching us!!'
There was a famous incident where a kid phoned into a competition on some BBC programme and was on air. When the presenter figured out she was in Dublin he gave her a stern telling off and cut the call live on air.
They also used to go out of their way to 'shield' their transmitters to prevent overspill. So they'd have lower power in costal areas or areas facing borders.
Meanwhile Irish TV broadcasters were deliberately trying to be picked up in Northern Ireland to gain ad revenue.
We also had a lot of commercial music radio stations based here that targeted the UK in the days that BBC retained a monopoly and didn't like 'pop music'.
Long Wave Radio Atlantic 252 for example was probably the very last of that model. It used a transmitter so powerful that it annoyed the Russians by broadcasting commercial pop with news on the hour that was overspilling into the USSR lol
How the world has changed in terms of media access!
