A few new channels [Archive]

FTA Michael

01-27-06, 12:44 PM

Scroll down to the bottom of LyngSat's Galaxy 4R page: http://www.lyngsat.com/g4r.html My Pansat scans them in as scrambled, but they're not.

Enjoy them while you can. And if you must discuss them here, please refrain from using channel names. ;)

FTA Michael

02-14-06, 01:28 PM

Broadly speaking, there are two types of FTA channels: those that don't care whether we third-party viewers watch, and those that do care. When we speak of the latter type, it's best to keep it vague.

In this case, a service designed for health clubs was transmitting several pay-TV channels (such as the leading US cable sports channel) without any encryption, which meant that anyone who tuned to that frequency could see them. The people who run those channels don't like it when folks get to watch without paying, and it stands to reason that the sooner they recognize this "leak" of programming, the sooner they will act to stop it.

Some folks think that these pay-TV folks employ humans to read these boards to find such leaks and other items they find interesting. I think it's likely that they at least use search engine spiders to crawl the boards and flag keywords. That's why Everything Seems Pretty Nebulous when it comes to describing exactly what's available.

Anyway, that small set of channels became encrypted less than a week after LyngSat published the details.