Receiving Dish Network on FTA Receivers

[last716bblrr]

Does anyone know if receiving Dish on an FTA receiver is possible? In Europe, there are encrypted signals out there that you must subscribe to in order to receive them. This is with normal FTA receivers. There are now FTA receivers out there (mostly for europe and they support NTSC) which support Nagravision encryption, which is the same encrpytion that Dish uses. As I have heard of people picking up some new dish channels which are not encrypted YET with FTA Ku band receivers, I would imagine with a supported CAM that you could subscribe to Dish and unencode Nagravision encoded channels. Does anyone have any insight on this? This would be great so that you can pick up normal FTA channels and Dish on the same receiver.

[Jacob S]

I imagine someone could make a receiver like this themselves.

[bryan27]

An old SkyVista or the current GlobeCast receivers might do it. Both have Nagra CAMs. But the thing you have to remember is E* will only subscribe a unit that has their numbers on it.

[zztzed]

Like Bryan said, it's probably possible, but the problem is getting Dish to sub the receiver.

I looked into something like this once...I wanted to build my own satellite PVR since I figured it'd be cheaper and at least I'd have control over the software that way. Unfortunately, I found out it's basically not possible, for the reason Bryan said. (Well, it might be possible, but I wouldn't dare try hacking a smartcard, which is probably the only way you'd be able to pull it off, if you could at all...) And it probably would've ended up being more expensive than a 721, anyway, since DVB tuner cards cost $250, then I'd have to buy the CAM, and get it all shipped from Europe since Hauppauge doesn't seem to sell the WinTV-DVB-s (the card I would've used, mainly because it's the only PCI DVB tuner card I know of) in the US.