Jeepguy, Good points! The spike had little to do with interest in the hobby and awareness of true free to air. It was 99.9% for the misuse of the term FTA to define the hardware used for theft of service.
Many people also uses FTA when referring to OTA TV.
Regulars here are hobbyists but don't forget that most FTA users are consumers. To get ethnic or religious channels, they hire an installer or search the internet for instructions to set it up once and not think about it as long as stay working.
I think the tapering has more to do with the "Digital Transition" of OTA TV and the wide availability of broadband. More stations are streaming on the Internet now. When I set up my 1st satellite dish for my parent on Christmas 1999 to get 1 Vietnamese channel (with only 8 hours of programming daily and had to use a series 1 Tivo to time-shift) and was happy to get that because there is no local Vietnamese channels. Today Houston has 5 or 6 local Vietnamese channels and there is much less need for satellite. Ethnic and religious channels seems to out number mainstream channels. People who uses satellite for Hispanic channels can get more over the air now than they can get on sat.
When the Polish channels on 97W got scrambles, a coworker switched over to an online DVR/on-demand streaming service. When I told him that the channels are now unscrambled, he has no interest in switching back. I've notice an increase popularity of "Chinese TV Box". I think these are XBMC or Android boxes preinstalled with hundreds of Chinese channels and probably proxy service to get around region lock. If I just start now, I would probably go with streaming rather than FTA.