BBC uses a simple huffman compression to reduce the volume of the EPG data. By that, they violate the DVB standard and thus are contemplating whether they should ask for licensing fee and treat it as a proprietary extension to the standard, or whether they should publish all details and ask for it to be integrated in the DVB standard.

There already exists some software that decodes some protected satelite channels using a regular Hauptpage TV card. Does that work by (ab)using the Hauptpage to only pick up the signal and then do all the processing *in software* (similar to the USRP in the article) rather than using the Hauptpage hardware?

If so, that would mean were already able to do TV decoding in software for years!