Thanks to whoever said, "If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft."

@Stjorn

2 ай бұрын

Well you're purchasing the authorization to be able to use/access that item. If you don't purchase that authorization, then you are legally not allowed to use/access it.

@codasoda

2 ай бұрын

​@@Stjornaccess and ownership are 2 very different things tho that's what they need to understand

@deshazo_henry

2 ай бұрын

​@@Stjornhis comment is clearly over your head, maybe don't chime in unless you understand the full context.

@nikomo

2 ай бұрын

That would be Cory Doctorow that said it, I believe.

@FunningRast

2 ай бұрын

@@StjornYeah sure, hidden deep in the T&Cs. Never when making the purchase or after when it just shows up as “owned” or “you already own this content” etc.

I'm not stealing TV. It's their signal that's invading my property, I'm simply watching it

@i_used_adblock_to_watch_this

2 ай бұрын

I remember that being most people's defense when it was so possible to do this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can no longer still TV right?

@RafaelOliveira-te6lm

2 ай бұрын

@@i_used_adblock_to_watch_this I dunno, I'm not american

@maillway

2 ай бұрын

🤣True true

@appliedengineering4001

2 ай бұрын

It's not the receiving of the signal that's illegal, it's the decrypting of it that's illegal, or better yet, How you obtained the decryption key's needed to decrypt the signal in the first place. And more then likely, the source of those keys did not come from the signal itself.

@josephlynch3746

2 ай бұрын

😂...it all started with that damn buzzing noise in brain 🧠 😒 ~*

“You wouldn’t download a car would you?” Yes. Yes I would. 😂

@foxguysumthing

Ай бұрын

me too

This episode was pirated off directv in Canada.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

You got that right !

@Genos2600

2 ай бұрын

Lol

These were the days. Being able to receive the raw feeds from onsite film crews was something else. Watching when they thought nobody was watching. I miss it.

@SatJunk

2 ай бұрын

It's still possible if you know where to look :)

@joshroolf1966

2 ай бұрын

Wow, I never considered that one before, I bet it had its moments?!😂💚🐾

The most stealth cable piracy device I ever saw was in 2004. A friend brought over a little black box and hooked it up in line to the coax on my existing cable box. Turned in on for a few minutes, and then REMOVED IT. From that point on my regular cable box was authorized to unlock every pay channel and no physical modification was done to the box whatsoever. He could use his device to "charge" as many cable boxes as he wanted. The "charge" usually lasted at least a few months, and then he'd come back over and do it again.

@jfbeam

2 ай бұрын

Sounds like an analog cable system. Digital cable doesn't work anything like that. (if the network doesn't send your box a periodic key, it can't decode anything. And those keys rotate rather quickly - so one hacked, authorized box can't fed them to others... which is one of the ways DTV was hacked.)

@wogfun

2 ай бұрын

@@jfbeam Yes it was the last analog box I'd ever have. About a year later I moved and got a digital system.

@derrekvanee4567

2 ай бұрын

Hah man, just tell you didnt "black box" sattelite in the way 00s that just had to *be recharged every few months* A few years prior you could indeed get sattelite with a large dish and steering controller. Cable and sattelite by the 2000s you had to find an adapter that you plugged the smart card into and flashed for your provider. Usually we had to pop em open and find the TX/RX serial pads and solder to said devices. When analog low Frenchy and laughable SoCs had PINS... Those were tbe cool days.

@wogfun

2 ай бұрын

@@derrekvanee4567 No I had heard of systems like that but never had one. From about 2001 to 2003 I had a little blue card programmer for DirectTV but keeping the cards alive was almost more of a hassle than just paying for the content. There were weeks I'd have to reprogram the cards multiple times, and then there was the complication of the cards getting looped, and it just became more work than it was worth.

@renderlessgames

2 ай бұрын

I got free tv permanently back in the 2000s as a kid this way. Idk why you had to "recharge it"

They talk about "Lost Money", but what they failed to realize is majority of the people that bought those cards were not going to buy the service in a legit way. So their not losing a customer or any potential revenue.

@PsRohrbaugh

2 ай бұрын

Exactly. You see the same thing with streaming. I'm not going to sign up for one more streaming service to watch a show.

@jfbeam

2 ай бұрын

Everyone likes to say that. But if you watch it without paying for it, that's lost income. That's money they did not collect from a viewer. It does not matter that you were never going to pay for it anyway.

@elisa_5445

2 ай бұрын

@@jfbeamHow is that a lost income if the person were not going to pay anyway, there's no way of losing something you wouldn't get

@Capturing-Memories

2 ай бұрын

@@jfbeam It does matter, and they like to call it loss so they write it off in the tax filing, But to be fair, not all pirates are not potential customers, some may have to purchase the service if there were no way to receive it.

@dariel5527

2 ай бұрын

@@elisa_5445it’s lost income because if someone wants to watch something that’s locked behind a paywall they are forced to pay but with the free alternative why even pay at all if I know I can get it for free it’s the same situation with movie site people can still pay to watch a movie but why pay when you can watch it on a website for free…

I love decoding a signal that is send your way is somehow illegal.

@vgamonitor

2 ай бұрын

still a signal of a paid service though

@drtibbs693

Ай бұрын

@@vgamonitorwhat you are paying for is the decryption keys and the hardware to use the service. In most countries around the world, broadcasters accept responsibility for the fact that transmitting freely-available signals incurs a risk; they can choose to mitigate this via the use of DRM, however circumventing it isn’t illegal. It’s in-fact completely legal to do what you wish with freely-transmitted signals.

Tech TV is very nostalgic. I remember The Screensavers show with Patrick Norton and Leo Laporte. Fresh Gear was cool too. Thank you for sharing this.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it

@DrexProjects

2 ай бұрын

Martin "what's his name" was kinda funny. Sargent , that's it.

That was a golden era. Thanks for posting this.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

My pleasure!

@troywhite6039

2 ай бұрын

@peterfairlie2296 Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?

One of the biggest motivators for Cable TV piracy that doesn't get much attention, was the fact that the networks that were on basic cable had advertising on them. I my self have never had a problem with the idea of pay TV it's self. But expecting people to pay for a TV service that has advertising in it. HELL NO. You want me to pay for it, Then lose the ad's.

@renderlessgames

2 ай бұрын

Good point. I still remember those 2000s commercials from when AI was a kid

I knew several people with this setup around 2000-2003. Got every channel on dtv. They had a card reader that plugged in between the receiver to prevent their card from being nuked. Everyone I know had cabletv descramblers in the 90s and 00s until digital cable took over. It is how I watched Stargate sg-1 as a kid. It is sad the government acted as private security for cable an sat companies.

@Browningate

Ай бұрын

And now, government wastes time entrapping people into governor kidnapping plots and other assorted nonsense.

A person could argue that they are double dipping. They are charging a service that is already bought and paid for by the advertisers who are running ads on the service.

More on satellite piracy! I love this dude! Awesome job again Peter!

Damn the quality on that old VHS is good!

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

That's because I always bought high quality tape and recoded on the top speed ST which gave 2 hours per tape. Most people bought cheap tapes and used EP which ran the tape at 1/3 the speed and gave you 6 hours of poor quality recording.

@paleskinnybones

2 ай бұрын

@@peterfairlie2296Could you possibly also upload this documentary in 60FPS? That’s how VHS really was you know

@JBBost

2 ай бұрын

The tracking on the VCR is garbage tho, unless sunspots were bad that day or something

@troywhite6039

2 ай бұрын

@peterfairlie2296 Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?

@7th_Heaven

2 ай бұрын

look at the NASA apollo photos and film. what was it like 72mm? there are folks nowadays who are like my 4K is better when in reality the old film had higher quality than many digital sensors now. when working with nuclear stuff many if not all digital devices die, so analog is still valid. be like "I'd like a rad hardened 4K gopro please?" slim chances of that existing. lol

The irony of watching a VHS Recording ripped to KZread is just amazing considering the subject being discussed. ❤❤❤❤ 😂😂😂😂

I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s ( born in 89 ) and vividly remember this stuff , my dad had a connection to a guy who would give him the hacked cards and I remember having access to all the paid access , ppv , porn , sports it was all just enabled lol. What a time to be alive - I now do " cybersecurity "

Gotta love how they say that paying subscribers are paying for the pirates too, good way to get people on your side.

@renakunisaki

2 ай бұрын

So, the pirates are paid for after all! So no money is lost.

what I find strange is the misuse of the word steaking, stealing is defined as "the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it" now the thing with "stealing it in Canada" is a bit of a misnomer, you see what they mean by "stealing" is not paying the license fee, but there isn't a license fee to pay in Canada as it isn't licensed to broadcast there so there isn't a license fee to steal.

you gotta love the "revenue lost" when it assumes that people who pirate would 100% pay monthly fees if pirating wasnt possible the good ol "we own your money, you just dont know it"

@kakd1870

2 ай бұрын

it actually does have an effect tho not as bad as they would have you believe. The data comes in after every ECM in the form of new subs.

@StaYUTI420

2 ай бұрын

@@kakd1870 It really doesn't tho, every time I've lost access its always been easier to wait for the next one, rather than throw money at the problem.

@FixTechStuff

2 ай бұрын

True. I cloned a friends gold card and connected it to a DVB card on my computer for recording, a lot of fun was had learning how to do it, but I wouldn't pay 1 cent for the garbage they broadcast.

2:05 "If you walk into an electronics store and walk out with a television without paying for it, that's stealing." I miss the 90's. 😆

@troywhite6039

2 ай бұрын

Today jt's called Black lives Matter

@RafaelOliveira-te6lm

2 ай бұрын

You wouldn't download a car

@NextNate03

2 ай бұрын

​@@troywhite6039Alex Jones, I thought you were banned from KZread. Good thing you owe about 1 billion dollars to the Sandyhook victims.

@SonOfAdolf

2 ай бұрын

Cuck

@Ozma2

2 ай бұрын

@@troywhite6039What do you mean by this?

The great days of satellite "testing". We were always a step ahead of them. They never fried hardware. It was always easily fixable. The old DTV H and HU cards. Dishnetwork was where it was at though if you were more of a hands on nerd. Battery cards, AVR cards, N1, N2 cards, emulation, etc... What a glorious time. Its all a thing of the past now though. Thanks for this bit of nostalgia!

@fauxque5057

2 ай бұрын

Wanna buy a Litronic 210 card reader writer? Boot board? Unlooper? How about some Oatmeal chips? Blank boards? I have boxes of stuff still laying around.

@Hippie459MN

2 ай бұрын

@@fauxque5057 That's stiff is pretty much obsolete now days. Not worth noting.

I still have my card readers, gold cards etc.

imagine a band suing you because you could hear them playing a concert from your house

It happened in other countries too during that time. In Europe HBO and Canal+ over cable was pirated so much that TV had to change technology often.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, my family had a cable descrambler. The people who lived in our house before us had the cable connected for free. Therefore, my parents paid nothing for cable and never got caught!

The price is going to increase weather or not you pirate the signal and often at the same rate. There are reasons tho even with all the warnings and threats, the consumers have little sympathy when they find a loophole to save money.

@kakd1870

2 ай бұрын

As for the 'lost revenue,' it actually does have an effect tho not as bad as they would have you believe. The data comes in after every ECM in the form of new subs.

I remember a friends uncle had a descrambler cable box back in the 90's. It was mind blowing stuff to me back then.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

I use to modify the Zenith SSAVI ST1000 cable boxes. The boxes used 8 bit addresses for remote addressing. You could capture a valid ID from the data stream into a shift register and then use that ID as your own in place of the static ID in the PROM. The box would stay on all of the time and decode everything.

Nice easy to understand report from Jennifer - What's she doing these days ? Did the $105/month back in 2000 get you totally ad free programming ?

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

Jenifer London, She lives in Mexico now ! www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-london-londonography/

@LatitudeSky

2 ай бұрын

The male host Alex went to work for CNN for a while, along with some other ex-TechTV News people.

That lost revenue number doesn't make any sense. That's assuming that everybody pirating would be a potential customer.

Now that piracy is very low the companies are charging upwards of 400+ a month for sports and box office channels. So if your not stealing from them they are stealing from you! LOL.

I remember when I had frontier TV here in CT after att sold to frontier. The ppv channel was working for free for like 4 years.

@CommodoreFan64

2 ай бұрын

I'm not surprised, as back in the early 90's my area had a small cable company called Palmetto Cable, and for like 4 months one summer all the PPV channels, including the adult ones where turned on before anyone at the company noticed it, so my friends who did not have cable where over at my house anytime they could when my parents where at work with their mouths hung open lol!

I miss tech tv! Thanks Fer sharing.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

You and me both!

thanks for posting this Peter; I think I remember watching this back in the day when we had cable!

Well that was an interesting watch. I LOVED that channel. I have some videos of one of their shows the screen savers.

I had a corrupt digital version of this one that Ive hung onto for at least 21 to 22 years. I am glad a good copy was finally found!

This is a great throwback! Thanks for uploading this.

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

*pulls out an F card*

@ProfessorBidoof

2 ай бұрын

have tons of old and modern dtv/dishnet cards, its a 1980 technology (iso7816), and they arent worth much today but worth more to me as sentimental value today. There was a day when H cards and/or HU cards (different times) were selling for over 400 bucks a piece. at one point walmart sold directv kits with hu cards that were cheap and easily hackable

That's a very nice encoding of a VHS video.

That argument of it costing the company's money was kind of crazy. They did lose money but they lost it fighting it. Not to mention how bell got rid of the ability for you to pick your own channel groups right after they killed the pirates. Driving costs way up for consumers.

@phat-kid

2 ай бұрын

how much money did they spend lobbying and getting the fbi to work for them? the federal government works for corporations, not the regular tax paying voter

These days it is not worth it to pirate live TV

@Wasmachineman

2 ай бұрын

shit kerel ik zie jou ook echt overal :P

@1marcelfilms

2 ай бұрын

ja ik ben overal en nergens tegelihjke @@Wasmachineman

@peterfairlie2296 Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?

I actually remember during my youth in the late 80's-90's the option to buy these small satellite dishes at swap meets which would allow one to get HBO for free. I also recall HBO having some kind of initiative where one could turn in your mini satellite dish in some kind of amnesty. Just wish I could remember more about this as I was a kid at the time.

thanks for the upload what an interesting little nugget of history :)

I live in Southwestern Ontario, but growing up never heard of stealing satellite tv. That all changed in 2005 when I had a co-op work term in Windsor for University and everyone there did it. I found it fascinating.

23 years later, it's still happening but now with firesticks

Imagine paying for TV and then having to sit through 10-15 minutes of ads an hour

thats cool thanks for shareing this info.

great find!

Curious to see more about the PC you use to convert analog video to digital; Specs, what OS/software you run etc...

the good old days

To think all of that would've been prevented if they had just sold satellite tv to Canada

@vgamonitor

2 ай бұрын

But Canada is not DirecTV's target contury so I'd say it's kinda understandable why they didn't do it

@jfbeam

2 ай бұрын

Wasn't really up to them. They didn't have a license to operate in Canada. And none of the channels they broadcast were licensed for broadcast into Canada.

@troywhite6039

2 ай бұрын

So it's ok for them to illegally broadcast without a licence into Canada and not pay for it?

@vgamonitor

2 ай бұрын

@@troywhite6039 but the hackers got directv working with a special unauthorized method, so technically directv isn't in the wrong here

I had so many of these cards. The Direct TV football card was the best!

I miss TechTV. Anyone remember "The Screen Savers"?

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, Leo and the other dude!

@smokedsmoked

2 ай бұрын

Hell ya .

you can do this with any IP gateway, though I'd imagine the redundancy requires it to connect through to either the same junction box, or same data center first

3:11 donor boards for a repair shop would've been a far better excuse

I, & some other family members, went to Blaine, WA, back in 2004, & walked through the Peace Arch.

Now we use a website and avoid subscription fees for streaming. how things change yet stay the same.

Man, I remember techTV. Use to watch the hell out of it. I also remember black boxes and bootleg cards. My neighbor had this elaborate set up where his satellite box was hooked to a computer tower next to his tv. That way if they zap the card it could immediately be reprogrammed. And this guy was not a computer geek, hell he about couldn’t use word 😂.

@noway9880

5 күн бұрын

yes. we need to stop tv before it's too late. SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT CABLE DOWN IN 2025!

Great quality considering how old that VHS was. Who remembers watching this on there authorized subscription back in the day? 😂📺📼

That's some good gravy.

Thanks 👍

wow, that was expensive back then.

The crime of stealing 1's and 0's that get delivered to your satellite dish (or cable connection) whether you like it or not.

I forgot about techtv is that who rebranded into G4?

@ENunn

2 ай бұрын

they merged with g4 to form g4techtv, then they dropped the techtv name a few months later. so yeah, pretty much

Back in the day, what was wrong with putting an antenna on your TV and watching free to air?? Anyhow I use Kodi these days.. Good video thank you.

This reminds me of that show; Beyond 2000

They wrote alleged pirate tv losses off on their taxes, they and Dish Network had no feedback as to who was decrypting signals in the first place. Oh the days of the Hu Card! 😂

Good video sir

Good times. I recently found some of my old H cards.

I wish i wasn't like 7 at the time things like this were happening, would have totally gotten in this.

I love this. Absolutely would have used it if i wasn't a child back then. Who actually cares if directv loses money?

My Freesat box has something resembling a CableCard slot, but I've never seen a card for it. I do know that Sky analogue had hacked cards that Sky would send a kill signal to several times a day (and that was over satellite) My EETV box which uses a combination of digital terrestrial (Freeview) and IPTV, doesn't use a card, it's controlled entirely by my ISP, who also happens to be BT/EE!

I miss the days of setting up dishes and finding the signal, I remember here in the PNW we could aim at the Canadian dishes as well as the ones over America.

Ahh the memories....

The real OGs remember the "Football cards" Easy to reprogram, took Direct TV over 2 years to sort out. Pirating Direct TV was an art. You had to dodge their code calls all the time that could potentially brick your card or worse your receiver.

What happened to your IKS video?

16:00 The franchise fee's part, do cable companies actually give money to local communities? I highly doubt any corpo would share their revenue like that.

Oh NDS. Towards the end of 2000s we just download a DLL plugin and load it with DVB Dream and all the encrypted channels were just as clear as clear stream channels.

Oh wow those were days tech tv was so good back in the day .they keep me watching what was newest tech back in the day .i tember this pretty well .

I dont undestand the Satalite model in the us, do you need to pay for every station on sat or what? i never paid or had a package so that i can watch tv thats just hooked up at a dish.

@RB-xm3ed

2 ай бұрын

It’s like satellite in most other countries. There are FTA/in the clear and then there are pay satellite services like Dish and Directv. With the latter two, there are tiers and each tier has a certain set of channels

@EinPinguin

2 ай бұрын

@@RB-xm3edAh ok so direct tv is like Sky and HD+, the latter one is just the free tv in HD

Nice!

And another thing you might not know Canada, as well as Mexico did not have a license for DIRECTV at the time they were actually getting programming for free because of what you would call the splash over which means the satellite signal would splash over into Canadian province, and then into the Mexican province which gave them access

Man I miss techtv, we had a hacked card back in the day. Themis the days

It's wild how people were able to steal the signal like that. You'd think merely decrypting it without authorization wouldn't take it away from its owner. But if it's theft, it must be getting taken, not merely decoded or copied... I wonder how that works?

I wonder how many people bought hacked cards/descramblers after watching this. Had I been a bit older I would have absolutely bought a descrambler.

I remember those days, when all the sudden our bill went up to subsidize the pirating. After DTV disabled all the cards on Black Sunday, the very next month, our bill went down. 😊 BTW, why did the US Treasury get the money after the sting? I would assume the money would have went to DTV to help offset their losses🤔

We had these cards in every box in the house.

Ironically enough, if Canadians had the option to pay for Direct TV, a sizeable amount would happily pay.

And this is exactly why i hate the media, even then they only showed one side of the story. They never tell you how the entertainment industry is f*cking with their customers. Why the hell did they think cord-cutting started? And even where i live, people are not willing to pay anymore for content and the crap they keep pulling on us. Alot of folks have started downloading from usenet since begin 2000s, i know i never stopped. But some others did when netflix started in 2013 over here but now with all the new streaming services and price hikes many started to download again. Or they are switching to illegal CS/IPTV subs which is very much thriving might i add. It seems like the entertainment industry will never learn, people are willing to pay if they get treated nicely and not used as milking cows.

@PsRohrbaugh

2 ай бұрын

Yeah I actually started laughing when the guy said "pirates drive up the price for everyone else, because we have to charge higher fees to cover our costs". Uh no... They would absolutely keep the price the same and just make more profits.

The HU cards took a while to become publicly available, DirectTV had about six months between the end of the H card and the HU card being completely broken. Either way, you needed new equipment (unlooper) and programs took a while to trickle out from the scene to the IRC channels. Most people stayed on the H card until they were canceled in 2002, at which point the tools for HU were widely available. Fortunately, I wasn't having to modify the cards for my mom's husband by that point.

@fauxque5057

2 ай бұрын

Not entirely true. The HU was hacked before Black Sunday. Once they killed the boot sector on the H card we were quickly able to mass produce the boot boards to get the H card back up and running. Also emulators became big business using the H card in the emulator. Eventually they shut down the stream leaving only the HU cards up and running.

@Tawnos_

2 ай бұрын

@@fauxque5057 Yeah, they were hacked before, but my searches back then turned up commercial options, only. It took a while for those HU hacks to be widespread such that you could just DCC it from public IRC channels. Never had an emulator, but I remember them being discussed as the potential next step for ECM handling.

I just aquired a Viewsat VS2000 Extreme with a hologram sticker & `Made in Korea` on the back, for the low price of free. Any tips on getting started? It powers up, no dish to test since I didn't know I'd get it today. Insides are suprisingly clean.

@peterfairlie2296

Ай бұрын

You can use it to get free FTA. See my video here on just how to do that: kzread.info/dash/bejne/lZpnmpWxmLPcY9o.html

Homer: So you're stealing cable...

I do remember tech tv, good times.

Oh wow this brings back memoies XD

Seeing the other half about cable theft. We still have that here in 2024 😂 We still have about 40 channels of analog with a mix of around 20 QAM channels in the open. About 2 years ago someone just down the road from me was caught, only caught because they where causing noise in the upstream from there twist on connectors lol.

Imagine watching this back then on a hacked Access Card Lmao nvm the ending

@peterfairlie2296

2 ай бұрын

Imagine watching it now on KZread, a recording that used a hacked Access card in 2001.

@ibrahimdevx

2 ай бұрын

@@peterfairlie2296Quite literally just did

@EvaFull

2 ай бұрын

@@peterfairlie2296 I noticed that irony. 😂

Ah yes. The good ole unencrypted wild wild West. Tech TV was in it's prime in this 99-2002 era. Why do i feel like DirecTV owned tech tv at this time after watching this? Whoops i meant direct television

@LatitudeSky

2 ай бұрын

TechTV in that era was owned by Vulcan Ventures, Paul Allen's company. He had bought it from Ziff-Davis and later sold it to Comcast. TechTV had a satellite transponder and wide system carriage, while Comcast's G4 struggled to find carriage. It ended up being cheaper buy TechTV for the transponder space and carriage than keep trying to get G4 carried.

@Emancipatriot

2 ай бұрын

@@LatitudeSky makes perfect sense . The logic behind the buy

DirectTV 595 to 600 with the pirated access card... I was only 8 years old =]

The whole video sound like a waste of public money to protect big corporation.