Hi, i have been on this forum for a while now and i have been reading all types of posts... I still can't connect these together....What i mean to say is that i do not get the political aspect of this business, how this business works..., who works for DN and how does pansat and cool*sat and stuff get related to all this... are theyy stealing channels from DN? If they are... then why is Fta or blacklist another separate organization of coders... why dosen't pansat just employ them directly... what is the difference between these companies such as pansat and cool sat... Where do the fake receivers come in? I mean if Pansat is stealing from DN then isn't pansat a clone (technically)? and if pansat is not stealing from DN, then why can't the original pansat boxes not get the channels...?
CAn some one pleasae Answer these questions? and also link how these different aspects of the story are connected to each other... who works for who? and who is a fake?
Satellite TV providers are DishNetwork (USA), DirectTV (USA), and BellExpressVu (Canada). They provide satellite TV for a fee and they rent/sell you the equipment to view said TV.
Many years ago, "testers" (people who hack satellite as a hobby) found a way to bypass the networks' security so that they can get free TV. Some people made a business of these hacks. So, to counteract lost sales, the networks implements counter attacks (known as ECMs) to prevent their signals from being stolen.
Recently, a new technology (although the concept has been around since the 70's), called Free-to-Air (FTA), emerged in the market. These receivers were supposed to just get the free satellite channels, that is channels which are not sold, but are of no charge. But... the FTA receivers are just like specialized computers, and the FTA companies discovered that they could emulate actual network receivers, and steal the signal from the satellite networks. FTA testing also is much easier to implement than testing on the card receivers - that's why it caught on like wildfire. Any julio could get one to work.
The companies that make the FTA receivers are c00lsat, viewsat, pansat, Fortec, etc... Each of these companies has their own staff of coders to develop software that counteracts any ECM created by the coders that work for the satellite networks.
The thing about the FTA receiver companies not officially having coders on staff (although they unofficially get paid and work for FTA companies) is that it is generally illegal to get free TV from the major networks.
When you buy an FTA receiver, the company makes no claim or guarranty, officially, that you will get free TV. But unofficially, to keep up their sales, they have their coders write software to counteract ECMs whenever they occur.
There's a lot more to this than what I explained above. But I hope it helps.
That's pretty much it, also the clones are smaller companies that don't have the money to pay coders so they just wait for the original to develop them, in other to counteracts this the original coders like Pansat write an extra set of codes to the bin to kill the clone, so the clone companies are force to paid a small amount of money to a few coders just to extract the string that kills the receivers to make it a safe clone file.
Jason: excellent summary, but towards the end, I think it is legal to the FTA makers to have coders, however, the key is that they are selling you a receiver, how you use it is up to you. This is pretty much similar to the cable boxes that were around 10 years ago, when cable was still analog and HBO only had one channel.