[Guest]

There was a post on one of the hacker boards of a DirecTV system that came from a Walmart with an alleged "U" series card. According to the post, the graphic was still of the football player on the card's face, but on the reverse side, the serial number started with "U" instead of "HU". Can anyone here verify this?

 

[Guest]

I heard something similiar for a different source, and believe it. D must do something about theft......

 

[Guest]

Thanks, Bob. There was a link over at DBS Forums a bit over a month ago about piracy of DirecTV and a comment from some bigshot at DirecTV that they were planning a system-wide swapout of the HU and remaining subscribed H cards, but he refused to give details when it would start. Maybe, this is it. It begs the question, though, who's gonna be paying for the exchange. With 10+ million subscribers, and conservatively 1/3 of them with two receivers, we're talking ~13+ million replacement cards. Even if NDS gives 'em the cards, the cost of FedEx'ing would still run over $39,000,000.00 . . .

 

[Guest]

How much is D loosing thru theft?

 

[Guest]

Actually its not just the cost of lost programming income but the cost of all those subsidized systems that are never activated or kept at minimal programming to meet a commitment.

They have to do something about the bleeding, as easy theft devalues D and DBS in general........

 

[Guest]

I dont know a dollar amount but from what I hear there are 1 milllion hacked subs. I wonder what D* plan is, obviousely ECMs arent working too well.

Steve

 

[Guest]

The two biggest problems with ECMs (real ones, not the nuisance "hashing" that merely require installation of a revised script) are: they inevitably take out some legitimate cards, and, new cards have been historically cheap by $50.00 cash and carry system purchases at Walmart. (It's not unheard of for some hackers to resign the new IRD, LNB, and dish to a dumpster!) Now that there's evidence that new systems are arriving "cardless" (to be FedEx'd only upon subscription activation), to some retailers, the easy, cheap supply of cards should start drying up. Once this becomes more widespread, another major ECM could be in the works. Such a move may be tolerable for DirecTV, even accepting the cost of replacing collaterally damaged legitimate cards, because they'd be confident that pirates would have an increasingly difficult and costly time of procuring more cards to hack.

 

[Guest]

Depending on how D* handles billing, they could ship the cards as part of a normal billing cycle.

 

[Guest]

(-bong-) Round Two

SAtBizNews headlines for 12/10/01 included a teaser that DirecTV would do a card swapout in the 1st quarter of 2001. Does anyone have any details on this?