I'm generally a fence-sitter on this issue. I've been on the inside/outside of satellite and content distribution since 1977, starting as a chief engineer in the broadcast world and working on the engineering and production side of the entertainment world. I don't do much of either anymore, but I keep in touch.
Whenever the question of posting FTA feeds vs. encryption comes up in forums, there is always extreme polarization and not much in the middle. But that's where I am. I doubt these discussions change many peoples' minds, and I have no expectation that proffering my views would make any real difference. So for the most part I will simply describe a handful of observations concerning the course of these debates. Nevertheless I do feel compelled by my industry background to state there is a generous amount of naiveté by purveyors of both extremes. I have seen very little of what is posted having anything much to do with reality.
To complete my full disclosure, I am a member of both SatGuy's and Rick's forums. I mostly joined to further the exchange of advanced technical know-how. I sometimes get good ideas and inspiration from others, and I hope to return these favors by offering mine. I do post feeds at Rick's, but I'm not terribly prolific. I've also considered joining WUT here, but I haven't taken the step. Enough preamble.
1. There is a lot of hypocrisy about keeping our FTA dream alive.
I believe most of us are in complete denial of a little secret - FTA and 4DTV are dying. Many of the companies that built the equipment I use have been out of business a long time. FTA-friendly companies are closing down and the distribution network is awfully thin. I've tried to order stuff from the few stores left in North America, but it's usually the same story: out-of-stock or we're not carrying that anymore. I can still get interesting equipment by importing it from Europe and Asia, but this is painful, costly and risky. I expect many if not most folks participating in FTA have been there a long time, and we're getting up in our years. Are we ourselves accelerating the demise of FTA?
While I've known for decades how to do the technical side of FTA, I never had the motivation until about three years ago. I had just revamped my state-of-the-art home theater systems, and was frustrated with the dearth of appealing and high-quality content. Rick's forum catalyzed me into putting up 15 dishes and a complex infrastructure because there was material posted that made it worth it. Since then I've persuaded a number of others to pursue FTA. None of them would have bothered without seeing what was available beforehand. Rick's forum filled that need, not SatGuys.
The second newbie need is help and guidance. Hardly any of the people I pointed at FTA were even casual acquaintances of mine, so I recommended they head over to SatGuys. From my perspective at the time there were a lot of old-hands committed to helping people to get started. What floored me is nearly every one of these newbies tried, got frustrated and gave up. When I looked from their perspectives, this made some sense. Their posts were sometimes ignored, given flippant responses, told to read a bunch of threads (not all of which were relevant), given many different opinions (some of which were dead wrong technically) and followed by arguments that degenerated completely off-topic. Looking back, I have myself been guilty of similar transgressions.
I was able to 'save' some of these newbies by personal intervention, but I've since realized forums like SatGuys appear to the outside to be run by insiders with a secret handshake. This keeps fresh blood out of FTA and ultimately hurts the cause.
2. There are arbitrary distinctions of what are acceptable open feeds to post.
Satellite Guys has 'TheList' and of course there is Lyngsat. I am not privy to the decisions of which feeds are allowed on either, or which ones are held back. Both have listed channels that were previously unencrypted and are now encrypted and vice versa. What makes these feeds different?
I don't think many if any members of WUT would be surprised that there are compelling technical reasons for temporarily turning off encryption from time-to-time. These are often predictable, and during my tenure, once the technical reason for turning off encryption goes away, the encryption is very quickly turned back on. Posting these feeds in the open does nothing to change the technical reasons.
There are many non-technical reasons why feeds are not encrypted. Some are quite obvious, some are benign and some are borderline sinister. This is the tricky ground because if we as feed-hunters do not know the reason, there is the chance that by openly posting a feed it may later become encrypted. I generally try to confine my feed posting to those where I have some knowledge of the reasons for non-encryption and a reasonable expectation that this will not be changed by my posting. I can certainly be wrong, but I expect many open posters do not care.
3. Can we really protect open feed posts?
It is not obvious to me that making forums 'bot-proof' or requiring a simple registration provides any real protection from minimally motivated visitors. I would nearly say the same for WUT. All of these methods will disrupt the casual web search, but as there are very, very few sites that provide feed information, anyone on the uplink side who wants to know what we know can easily focus their efforts. The WUT vetting process might keep a 'bad guy' out a bit longer, but if someone on the uplink side wanted to penetrate WUT, they could likely gain an accelerated entry by carefully dribbling out their knowledge and inside information. It would only take one slip of this bastion to confound the entire effort, and for all we know this may have already happened. WUT could be a source for feeds that will become encrypted.
4. FTA technologies we want may become the real dilemma.
Who here doesn't want a better blindscanner? These and other forums are filled with discussions about the speed and accuracy of this function on the latest receivers, spectrum analyzers, channel editors, etc. If this technology becomes too good, it will no longer take something like Rick's forum to scare the living daylights out of those trying to protect open feeds. One person with a little web background would be enough. The technology is already there. About a year ago I started playing with a number of improvements to blindscanning, as some here may remember. I built a rudimentary system in January, but had to put it aside because of other commitments. I've worked on it recently, and am now in a quandary. I am very nervous about releasing any part of this work. The potential for irresponsible use is very high and we might all suffer. Of course if I don't do it someone else will.
5. I don't see dramatic differences in the 'money trails' between the forum sites.
Maybe I just don't get it. This topic very much concerns some people, but not me. Running websites costs money, and we can expect the web will evolve dramatically over the coming decade as businesses try to recoup their costs and make a business case for it. Rick runs a business and has a forum. Scott has a forum partially supported by businesses. Sadoun used to be a supporter of SatGuys, runs a business and has a forum. The motivations for running each forum may be completely different, but they share some practicalities. Is any of this shocking or even a big deal? While this doesn't bother me in the slightest, I see a much higher percentage of commercially-oriented posts (from gold sponsors) at SatGuys than at Rick's or Sadoun's. I could say ominous things about these money trails, but this looks to me to simply be capitalism in action.
