But were you ever able to buy those boxes from other than Directv or one of their resellers? Direct at one time was Hughes/Directv and remained tied to Hughes until 2006. There was a point in time when they contracted Thomas communications (part of the RCA brand) to do hardware. I'm not sure where Phillips and Samsung fall in Direct's lineage but I suspect they were contracted by Direct at some point to produce hardware. I could definitely be wrong but I don't believe there was a time that you could walk into an electronic retailer and just purchase a STB for either Direct or Dish that was not selling their service, and receiving the STBs for sale from either Direct or Dish. So the while in your example Samsung was building boxes for Direct, Samsung could not sell those same boxes direct to a retailer, unless perhaps that retailer was selling Direct service.
Imagine the innovations we might see if STB production was open to the entire electronics market. So the provider, let's use Dish as example, would provide a spec of how they would deliver and encode the signal. They require the use of a smartcard so that the boxes could be activated and only subscribed programing would be decoded, but beyond that the manufacturers would be free to build in any bells and whistles they wanted to differentiate their box from others. Much like cable or dsl modems and routers. You can go out and buy pretty much any you like. You decide how much or how little you wish to spend depending on the features, warranty and reliability you wish to have. Remove R&D costs from the carriers, the hardware costs etc. Carriers could then invest those funds to improve their networks. They could contract any one of the manufacturers to sell them gear for those who choose not to buy their own but rather have the carrier drop everything at the door for them, but those costs would be minimal compared to being the only supplier of hardware and having all the R&D expense, inventory expense, repair/refurb expense etc.
