I'm not certain who is doing this sort of satellite reception in the US these days, but I read a bit about it recently, and it seems that there is quite a lot of foreign programming available via un-scrambled, or "clear" satellite transmission.
In fact, foreign programming makes up the bulk of usage statistics for this type of broadcasting.
I think this is kind of a niche thing in the United States, but is bigger in Europe, and Asia. The type of transmissions are something like mpeg-2 encoded, so its very efficient for them to say have 24 channels multiplexed on one transmission--- something to that effect, I think.