I remember it was 1992, when our local area cable operator came to our house and said we would get more channels than what we got through our antenna which was only DD-1. He put another cable wire with a cable socket and connected it to the back of our TV and removed the antenna socket. The price was 75/ month. We used to get international channels like Prime sports, BBC, Star TV which was a English GEC(before it became star plus), ZEE tv, Jain TV and ATN. 6 channels that's it and it was whole new world from Doordarshan. If you had to watch cricket matches on DD, you had to remove the cable socket and replug the DD socket from the antenna. The same cable operators gradually ugraded and started to give more channels on the S-band and hyper band. Our Videocon TV didn't have that capacity and had to install those extra bands on our TV from a service person. Wow we used to get 45-50 channels around 1997. I remember we used to keep the most frequently watched channels in the first 10-15 channels on the TV.
Back then we could tune the TV receiver and decide on which channel number we kept or stored a particular TV channel. Sports and regional GEC we're always on the first list.
By early 2000s the cable operators upgraded.
By 2007 we got local cable set top boxes by DEN and then the same cable operator ugraded to Siti. We used to get 800 channels for Rs 250/-.
Until the new stupid rule of Trai came about and ruined everything where you had to buy packages . This may have benefitted those on dth but it was a big blow to those on local cable networks where there was no concept of any packages and charges were also minimal.
Now the local cable operator has upgraded to HD , same cable operator for the past 25 years.