Free-to-Air TV and Radio? 64
ChiaBen asks: "I was visiting a friend recently who has a Free-to-air satellite receiver. It allows him to pick up any free satellite TV and radio programs, along with many pay-to-view (requires a payment, of course) programs. Nokia has a receiver, and I'd like to know if else is making similar hardware. It seems interesting, but before I drop a few hundred bones on one, I'd like to know what everyone has to say about it?"
sheesh (Score:1)
Read the wiki link you posted, all the information you need is there as a start point.
ps: buy pansat!
There are MANY companies making these receivers. (Score:2, Insightful)
viewsat
fortec
many more.
try www.al7bar.tk for more info
posted anon for personal reasons
Re:free to air tv and radio, if you steal it! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to assume that you are making a joke here. Yet, I'm not so sure that's how you mean this to be taken.
Free to Air or FTA Satellite TV has nothing to do with stealing content. The systems and broadcasters that want to protect their content have, using multiple encryption schemes. But there are birds up there that still have plenty of unscrambled content on them. It is *exactly* the same as putting an arial on your roof and receiving your local TV stations directly and telling your cable company to take a long walk.
This has nothing to do with trying to force / crack security ala DirecTV access cards to receive pay content for nothing. Please note the difference.
Yes and no... (Score:1, Interesting)
BUT! There is also a HUGE part of "FTA" which isn't exactly like that either... In fact, I'd say that's the majority more than the exception. Most FTA receivers I've seen can decrypt signals once you give them proper decryption keys - some will even "autoroll" them and such. I know dozens of ppl that own "FTA" receivers and DVB cards - *EVERY* single one of them uses it to watch DishNetwork/E
Re:free to air tv and radio, if you steal it! (Score:2, Insightful)
When I cook spaghetti, I do object if someone else eats it, because then I cannot eat it. His action hurts me exactly as much as it benefits him; only one of us can eat the spaghetti, so the question is, which? The smallest distinction between us is enough to tip the ethical balance.
(Why software should not have owners, RMS, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html [gnu.org])
(paraphrase of the next paragraph of the same text) When someone views a TV broadcast, it doesn't hurt
Re:I do not do this. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a lot of honestly free data coming off of the sattelites. NASA, for example has their live feed channel(s). Not only are they fine with you catching those signals, much of their stuff is public domain by law. (stuff that is produced by contractors might still be copyright). Then there's all sorts of interesting telemetry. If you know how to decode it, I'd expect that much of NASA's survey imagery is also unencrypted.
The stuff that's encrypted, is probably going to be illegal to decode (according to the DMCA). The stuff that just has wierd encoding, however, should be free to decode. If you only use it personally, then you're almost guaranteed to be safe (IANAL). If you want to use it commercially, then you need to make sure that you're using government data that is (1) public domain and (1) not 'top secret' ( although somebody at the NSA should be shot if they're still transmitting top secret data unencrypted.)
Re:I do not do this. (Score:4, Informative)
The best analogy I can think of is that decoding a flashing light you can see from your back yard is stealing. (Yes I understand that technically speacking, sattelites don't communicate via a flashing light, but then again, if you think about the nature of electromagnetism...)
Re:I do not do this. (Score:2)
Well, in theory you're right. They're sending the data to you, regardless if you requested it or not.
That was the old logic behind stealing cable. They happened to run a cable line right past your house (on your property maybe), so putting in a splitter and taking the signal was fine.. Then people found out they were wrong.
Cable companies started putting filters in to block particular channels. People would 'accidently' climb the poll and replace them with
Re:I do not do this. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I do not do this. (Score:2)
My previous post should not be
Re:I do not do this. (Score:2)
And whom did I force to send all those private radiowaves my way, in a format I can decode? Just because something is convenient for a particular person or company doesn't mean everyone else should be banned from using commonly available technology in their own private space.
Re:I do not do this. (Score:3, Funny)
> broadcast into your back yard?
Yes! If you think you have a chance of doing it and are 'into' that sort of thing you most certainly should try. If you succeed you should quietly notify the agency that their crypto is breakable. Because if you can break it the odds are that another intelligence agency somewhere can also break it. Peer reviewing our national security aparatus should be considered patriotic.
Re:I do not do this. (Score:2)
Of course it would be your problem. You should have purchased a FTA receiver that wouldn't lock up when fed unrecognizable or malformed input. Just as in the case of their poor assumption that you wouldn't build or buy a third-party receiver to pick up the data they're broadcasting indiscriminately, it would be a poor choice on your part to assume that their broadcast will always be encoded in the form your receiver expects, and the reciever should take that into account.
If
Re:I do not do this. (Score:1)
Re:I do not do this. (Score:2)
On a related note, why does it seem that every time somebody figures out some new way of making everyone's lives better (like radio), things that are perfectly acceptable at first (like building/using any kind of radio receiver you wanted to) eventually become illegal, until in the end only a fraction of the discovery's promise remains? It's rather depressing. Maybe one day we'll wake up and discover that there's nothing
mostly scrambled or encrypted... (Score:5, Interesting)
back in 'the day', it wasn't uncommon to find network feeds (being sent to affilliates ahead of the actual air date, very popular among bab5 & trek fans) and raw feeds from sporting events. bulletin boards (bbs's) that were dedicated to this 'hobby' were around so you could find out where and when to point your dish to pick those signals. but last i was in front of a big dish, most of those things were scrambled. most everything is digital (and also encrypted) these days..
i can remember spending time out in the backhills of west virginia. there was a huge cottage industry involving setting up a 'free' dish and 'broken' receiver. dunno if it's like that today (this was ~10 yrs ago), probably not as the move to digital (which is theoretically easier to protect) was just kicking into high gear about then. i just found it rather amusing to see pickup trucks, to numerous to count, hauling around 6 foot dishes and going door-to-door.
Re:mostly scrambled or encrypted... (Score:2)
Big dish still lives (Score:5, Informative)
Get a DVB-S card (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, a PCI DVB-S card can be as cheap as $50, and with software decoding, you can play 4:2:2 streams, HDTV streams, free IP access from some satellites, and you don't need to worry about whether or not the reciever manufacturer will fix any bugs in it's firmware, or whether or not one reciever has an difficult to use menu system, etc.
Disclaimer: I don't have either, but I've been looking at info all around the net (user reviews, forums, etc), deciding the same thing myself, over the past few weeks.
Re:Get a DVB-S card (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Get a DVB-S card (Score:2, Informative)
For all you linux lovers out th
Move to the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Move to the UK (Score:1)
Re:Move to the UK (Score:2)
It's interesting that here in the US, few people even know what an aerial is any more. For years, real estate developers have been making deals with cable companies to force their residents into purchasing cable TV. This is done by writing clauses into local convenants (CC&Rs) that restrict home owners from putting up an antenna for aesthetic reasons, so most people just buy cable whether they need it or not.
I
Re:Move to the UK (Score:2)
Re:Move to the UK (Score:1)
yes, but the the food is so...... bleh.
FTA vs Stealing (Score:1)
Get a 1 meter dish... (Score:2)
Recievers are cheap too, on ebay. Figure out where you'd want to point the dish, and get a reciever capable of decoding whichever bird it's aimed at.
Setup fee: $100,000 (Score:1)
Like a primestar. Install it yourself, it's not so tough.
Problem is that such a dish costs $100,000 or more if your landlord or neighborhood association forbids satellite dishes.
Re:Setup fee: $100,000 (Score:2)
Landlord can only forbid it if there are no exclusive use areas.
And, since that's what the question is, that's a pretty fucking stupid thing to say.
BUD (big, ugly dish) (Score:3, Interesting)
They say there was a time when people wanted to see telephone and power wires because it meant progress. Now we have to hide infrastructure underground, lest we offend the eye...
Re:BUD (big, ugly dish) (Score:2)
Re:BUD (big, ugly dish) (Score:2)
1) Chances are, if you are a geek, you CAN afford a big honkin plot of land somewhere.
Chances are, if you can afford a big plot of land, it can't get cable or DSL Internet access.
Re:BUD (big, ugly dish) (Score:1)
The truth is these recivers use the same DishNetwork or DirecTV dish (46cm) that many of you already have attached to the side of your house. At worst you would need a 100cm dish.
Re:BUD (big, ugly dish) (Score:2)
Why? What important DVB-S signals are available on C-Band? It seems most everything is in Ku-Band now, which means you can get away with a MUCH smaller dish. Either a relatively tiny general-purpose 1.5m or throw-away DishNet/DirecTV dish.
Where do you live? I'll guess Eastern USA, or in a major city (LA, SF, etc), because p
list of free tv available (Score:1)
Don't make it to easy for us... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't make it to easy for us... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh come ON... everyone knows Al Gore isn't British.
Re:Don't make it to easy for us... (Score:2)
Re:DoD is British? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh dear. Hand in your geek card. The parent said 'computers and the web', not 'computers and the internet'. You think 'web' and 'internet' are synonymous? What are you doing on Slashdot?
For the record, it's certainly true that a Briton invented the Web: specifically it was Tim Berners Lee, while working at CERN. As for computers, that's probably also true, but depending on what yo
Don't bother. (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll also quickly find out that most of the information about "free to air" receivers is actually put up under the guise of providing information for a similar and considerably more common activity; reprogramming the receivers with firmware that can decrypt, in software, the encryption schemes used by Dish Network and Bell ExpressVu (who both use the DVB standard for their broadcasts, DirecTV uses a proprietary standard).
Re:Don't bother. (Score:2)
Re:Don't bother. (Score:2)
AFAICT that's the only way to use home-brew hardware with one of these services. So, if you subscribe legitimately but have one of those PoS receivers that are provided which crashes all the time, forgets to tape your shows, hangs up when you try to stop a recording, etc, ad. nauseum, you have to either suck it up or go grey.
I'd love to be proven wrong on that as I haven't f
Re:Don't bother. (Score:2)
That's very much true in Europe as well. All the European and African countries share the same satellite broadcast system. It's interesting to see what each culture considers the most important. While UK companies seem to broadcast porn, premium rate dial in competitions and bargain basement sales, China is broadcasting business news progr
Man gets 5,000+ channels on 12 dishes (Score:2)
"Al Jessup of Beckley, West Virginia, has 12 cheap satellite dishes stuck to his house, which pull in over 5,000 free-to-air channels from satellites all over the sky. He is retired, and delights in odd and foreign programming."
FTA is fun, cheap and interesting! (Score:3, Interesting)
Because I wasn't really sure about FTA I wanted to get into it as cheaply as possible. I bought a cheap 0.3dB LNB and a truly crappy receiver on eBay, used an old Primestar 40" x 30" dish (which turns out to be one of the best dishes you can get for FTA), hooked it all up, got it aimed at Intelsat Americas 5 [lyngsat.com] and started watching! I think my total equipment investment was in the neighborhood of $100. I did replace my craptastic receiver with a more expensive ($150 at the time) Fortec Lifetime Classic [sadoun.com], but it was worth it. You can, as others have said, go with PC-based solutions, too - PCI or USB satellite receivers - but I wanted a standalone receiver just to start.
Yes, as others have pointed out, most of what's available via FTA in North America is religious programming or bizarre foreign channels, but don't let that discourage you! First of all, that stuff ranges from entertaining to totally weird (like the old animated Star Trek series dubbed in Armenian, or some damned thing). If you're sick of the crap on American TV, this'll definitely give you something more interesting to check out. Second, there are some American channels up there, especially PBS and the like, but some network affiliates as well. And if you're really determined, you can find network feeds, where the networks send their shows to their affiliate stations in the clear, before they officially air. You can also find news crews out in the field, often doing flattering things like swearing and picking their noses before as they set up and test their equipment before a remote report.
FTA is like the Wild West of television. It's not always easy to find the good stuff, but it's worth the effort.
Check out the SatelliteGuys forum [satelliteguys.us] if you want more information. The people there are extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. I'm just a user there, not an admin or owner, so I'm not trying to shill for the site or anything. I just love it.
FTA DVB is a blast (Score:1)