Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first public satellite television signals from Europe to North America were relayed via the Telstar satellite on the 23rd of July 1962, watched by over 100 million people. A test broadcast had taken place on the 11th of July, almost two weeks before the public transmission.
Taylor Howard of San Andreas, California, was the first known private citizen to receive C-band satellite signals at home, using a system he built himself in 1976.
Early systems operated on C-band frequencies between 4 and 8 GHz, which carried weaker signals that required large parabolic antennas, typically over 3 meters in diameter, to collect enough signal strength. The shift to higher-powered Ku-band satellites in the 1990s allowed dishes smaller than 1 meter.
Digital satellite broadcasts began in the United States in 1994 through DirecTV using the DSS format. DVB-S digital broadcasts launched in South Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia-Pacific in 1994 and 1995, reaching most of Western Europe and Japan by 1997-1998.
VideoCipher II was an encryption system adopted by HBO in January 1986 to scramble its satellite signal, the first major channel to do so. It used analog video scrambling and Data Encryption Standard-based audio encryption. Big-dish owners protested because they had no alternative access to those channels, and the scrambling sparked a black market for descrambler devices after the system was defeated.
A sun outage occurs when the sun lines up directly behind a geostationary satellite, within the receiving dish's line of sight. The sun's microwave emissions on the same frequencies as the satellite's transponders overwhelm the signal. This happens for roughly 10 minutes per day around midday, during a two-week period in spring and fall near the equinox.