HAVE ????'S ABOUT FTA BEING LEGAL

[desert]

I HAVE BEEN TOLD RECENTLY ABOUT FTA. I DO NOT QUITE UNDERSTAND IT BECAUSE THEY WAY HE EXPLAINED IT "SEEMS TO GOOD TO BE TRUE". (THAT SCARES ME). THIS GUY TOLD ME THAT HE HOOKED UP AN FTA RECEIVER AND CAN NOW GET ALL PAY PER VIEW FIGHTS AND ALL NFL FOOTBALL GAMES "LEGALLY".

WHAT IS THE "REAL" CAPABILITY OF THIS SYTEM?

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME.

 

[Mr Tony]

THIS GUY TOLD ME THAT HE HOOKED UP AN FTA RECEIVER AND CAN NOW GET ALL PAY PER VIEW FIGHTS AND ALL NFL FOOTBALL GAMES "LEGALLY".

WHAT IS THE "REAL" CAPABILITY OF THIS SYTEM?

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME.

please turn off all caps. Makes it looks like you screaming

2ndly...what is posted above is STEALING and not condoned here. Answer me this...since its scrambled and he is trying to override that scrambling, how is that legal??

your "friend" is confusing stealing as free to air. FTA is picking up unencrypted programming. There is lots of channels up there on various satellites that are free as long as you have the right equipment. check out thelist at the top of the page for channels available

We love folks who are doing FTA legally

 

[gillham]

Getting pay tv without paying is illegal as you guessed, that is why it is called *pay* tv.

Checkout The List! at the top of this forum and this link for simplified information about legal FTA.

You won't see pay-per-view or any premium channels in that list, but plenty of interesting programming. FTA is not always a good substitute for pay channels, but for many people it provides enough when combined with an OTA antenna.

Equipment for legal FTA reception can be hand for almost free if you scrounge around, or you can buy or build a nice package with new equipment. You'll need a 36" dish, an LNBF and a receiver at a minimum. Along with a place to mount it that has a good view of the Southern sky. There are tons of threads here about getting started, just read through this forum.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

True and not true.

FTA (Free To Air) will pick up anything thats not scrambled. However most sports events, PPV events etc are scrambled. But with that said over the last year there have been a number of things that were transmitted in the clear that were not scrambled, and this did include a number of sporting events and PPV fights. (Again the majority of those were indeed scrambled) the only ones who saw those events were those die hards who do nothing all day but scan the skies looking for new signals.

So anything that is transmitted in the clear is legal to receive. However modifying your equipment to descramble programming is illegal. Also with changes in the scrambling security as of late (and more changes coming) those illegally modified boxes will stop working soon. So if you decide to buy one of those boxes, besides possible having your name address and other information obtained by the security departments of the satellite companies changes are also good that you will have would up paying more for a pirated box that does nothing then if you just ordered the programming legally.

In other words if your looking for NFL / MLB / UFC / WWE type PPV events then your wasting your money.

 

[tvropro]

If the receiver is being used to circumvent scrambling of a pay service such as dish network it is illegal. If it is picking up a feed that is being transmitted in the clear it is not illegal. FTA receivers have been used with special modifications to get dish network and bell expressvue. Those two companies are securing there systems as we speak and anything that may still be working today won't be very soon. These pirates that use FTA receivers for such has given us legal users a bad name and we don't appreciate it.

 

[skynyrd]

Yeah, I hate it when I tell someone about FTA and they say.. "Yeah, I have a friend who does that... The've been knoking those boxes out lately, haven't they?" I just tell them that I'm not into that kind of FTA, and the kind that I am into is legal. However, for most people FTA = pirate satellite, sadly

I also have friends that never seem to understand that "If it's not encrypted, its legal to recieve".

I look at it as an OTA antenna looking at the sky. If an OTA channel is encrypted (which may happen one day), then most people can understand that would mean that it is illegal to decrypt it without paying, but it would still be legal to see anything else that was unencrypted..

However, some people don't even get that.. One person told me "did you hear that OTA antenna's would be illeagal after Febuary?" That one was pretty interesting... Lots of miscommunication out there.

I enjoy FTA because it is fun to see what's in the sky, free and legal, available to us.. Theres a learning curve to it, but like the saying goes, If it's easy, it ain't worth having... If you want a simple "push a button and there it is" system, then sub to Dish, Direct, or cable. Otherwise, read up and have fun.

 

[KE4EST]

True and not true.

Also with changes in the scrambling security as of late (and more changes coming) those illegally modified boxes will stop working soon. So if you decide to buy one of those boxes, besides possible having your name address and other information obtained by the security departments of the satellite companies changes are also good that you will have would up paying more for a pirated box that does nothing then if you just ordered the programming legally.

In other words........... then your wasting your money.

I had a guy call me the other day and say, Hey I got your number from someone that said you were real good with satellite stuff. Well anyway my son and I have lost our Canadian channels on box xyz. All I said was, so you have an illegal box....long pause...then he said how did you know..

 

[tvropro]

I look at it as an OTA antenna looking at the sky. If an OTA channel is encrypted (which may happen one day), then most people can understand that would mean that it is illegal to decrypt it without paying, but it would still be legal to see anything else that was unencrypted..

Channels have been encrypted OTA in the past. ON-TV a pay movie service and a few others were scrambled around the country back in the 1980's. People did the same thing there doing with dish network, getting decoders and watching programming for free. There will always be some out there that will try to steal pay programming as long as there is a way. I don't think it's 100% stopable. The thing is it gets totally out of hand and gives people like us a bad name because the term FTA for most mean's stealing.

 

[Blindowl1234]

ON TV

On TV that's one I haven't heard in a lot of years. I remember an engineer at a local tv station designed and built a protoype board for an ON Tv receiver. There were lawsuits here because some of their programs showed some nudity and the locals went after them. The lawsuits were dropped after ON TV shut down. On the topic of legal/ illegal FTA. Why would you pay good hard earned money for a hacked box that will only work a short time? Then when it doesn't work who you gonna find to fix it? The guy that sold you the hacked stuff made his money and is probably long gone. There's a sucker born every minute I guess, Blind

 

[skynyrd]

On TV that's one I haven't heard in a lot of years. I remember an engineer at a local tv station designed and built a protoype board for an ON Tv receiver. There were lawsuits here because some of their programs showed some nudity and the locals went after them. The lawsuits were dropped after ON TV shut down. On the topic of legal/ illegal FTA. Why would you pay good hard earned money for a hacked box that will only work a short time? Then when it doesn't work who you gonna find to fix it? The guy that sold you the hacked stuff made his money and is probably long gone. There's a sucker born every minute I guess, Blind

I never seen ON-TV (It was never in my area, and almost before my time), but it was interesting to watch the Youtube clips on it.. Kinda reminds me of VC in a way while it scrambled.. (I know its probably not the same though).. I believe ON-TV used some kind of Oak-Orion scrambleing from what I hear.. pretty interesting for its time.

Re-visiting the FTA pirate topic... Does anyone know when Dish will pull the plug on those guys? I saw on Lyngsat where it looked like Bell had went completely with Nagra 3 encryption.. but still saw Dish had Nagra 2/3.. Hopefully soon they'll cut it off, and then they'll be some cheap FTA boxes out there. for us legal guys...

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I talked with the head of security for Dish about this at CES and he told me that they had a few customer needing upgrades to their equipment and then it would all be flipped over to the new security.

I personally can't wait for that to happen, it can't happen soon enough.

 

[skynyrd]

I talked with the head of security for Dish about this at CES and he told me that they had a few customer needing upgrades to their equipment and then it would all be flipped over to the new security.

I personally can't wait for that to happen, it can't happen soon enough.

You said it... It'd be nice to have a few HD boxes cheap.. Hopefully whatever comes up next on that end won't involve FTA boxes, and hopefully they won't try to call it FTA either..

 

[KevinAPB]

It never gets old hearing all the arguments over receiving a signal period vs scrambled and not scrambled, its on my property so its mine, its canadian or american so its not within my countries jurisdiction etc..etc..

I am all fired up Legally here and as it was previously said, with my OTA and FTA, I get my Al Jazeera and RTN plus my digital HD locals, way enough for us and its all free too. I can't see OTA going scrambled anytime soon though, its going to go the other way I think. Watch soon as Internet is free over WiFi in major cities. Its going to start a lot of chatting about other things such as television information reception.

An FTA receiver out the box will suck up tons of awesome free stuff with a nice Bud and or smaller dish. I use a Bud and a hand me down from a closed US Post Office building a friend of mine purchased after Katrina, the dish is about 3 foot or so offset. It had a transmitting dojob on it so we yanked that and stuck a Ku Hughes Universal on it and its a powerhouse. Its stuck right into a big iron vent pipe and fits perfectly. I left it up for the post Katrina hurricanes and it never budged an inch.

Enjoy your legal receiver.

 

[skewed]

Before I begin I want to apologize in advance if anything that I say is out of line. This subject of what is out there for free and the inability to speak about it has always aggregated me. You can talk about what you want on a hacker site but no one there knows anything about FTA and most don’t care what you’re doing. Then you’re labeled a hacker. It’s my take that this is a hobby and for it to survive you need to get people involved in it. If others would not get involved in it there would be no demand for equipment and hence no hobby. Also for many who decide to look into this hobby most want to know if there is anything up there that justifies there expense of starting up. STEALING is NOT a benefit. In my opinion anything that is encrypted is stealing if you defeat the encryption. I also believe it is impossible to steal something that is not encrypted. I think ALL of us here fear encryption, because well quite frankly, it would put an end to our hobby, and for some of us end there only means of TV. Even understanding that, and trust me I really do understand, I sometimes feel like not all things should be considered taboo. I feel like if you want to hide a single channels unencrypted presence that may be justifiable to make it last a little longer. But one time feeds I think could be discussed here without problems.

Scott said
“ FTA (Free To Air) will pick up anything thats not scrambled. However most sports events, PPV events etc are scrambled. But with that said over the last year there have been a number of things that were transmitted in the clear that were not scrambled, and this did include a number of sporting events and PPV fights. (Again the majority of those were indeed scrambled) the only ones who saw those events were those die hards who do nothing all day but scan the skies looking for new signals.”

I’m not really a die hard but you would be surprised at what a determined “team” of people can find when you have help. You see you only have a about a 15 min time span to find these events. A team of people with a common goal can split up and find things very quickly. It’s my rule that if it is live then there must be a feed. Then there’s always the case that you may find exactly what you’re looking for and it may be end up being encrypted. But sometimes you get lucky; overall I have been pretty lucky. Not as lucky as the peeps with the Quali-TV receiver, but oh, and that reminds me. I think that those people who spent 600-700 dollars on a Quali TV box that cannot edit and has no blind scan would be the best ones say what is up there. That’s a major investment to watch PBS.

I have 2) closing comments. 1) I wish that the hackers were using the Quali-TV receiver so I could pick up one of those cheap when the signal is finally secured, but I will settle for a 50 dollar Pansat HD.

2) I know the debate over if something should or should not be spoken about here has already been settled, but I wish the rules were a little more clearer so that when people like this one ask these types of questions I know what I can say and still not break the rules.

 

[tvropro]

I never seen ON-TV (It was never in my area, and almost before my time), but it was interesting to watch the Youtube clips on it.. Kinda reminds me of VC in a way while it scrambled.. (I know its probably not the same though).. I believe ON-TV used some kind of Oak-Orion scrambleing from what I hear.. pretty interesting for its time.

ON TV was awesome in it's day. I subscribed to it, cost $24.95 a month, kept it till they went off the air. It was a lot simpler to decode than the oak orion system, that was gated sync. ON was a sinewave system. Two 1458 op amps did most of the video work and a 565 PLL chip decoded the audio. Plans were all over the place back in the day.

 

[navychop]

If an OTA channel is encrypted (which may happen one day), then most people can understand that would mean that it is illegal to decrypt it without paying, but it would still be legal to see anything else that was unencrypted..

It's already happened, sorta. Remember [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USDTV"]USDTV - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Usdtvlogo.png" class="image"><img alt="Usdtvlogo.png" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Usdtvlogo.png"@@AMEPARAM@@en/d/da/Usdtvlogo.png[/ame]

 

[tvropro]

I talked with the head of security for Dish about this at CES and he told me that they had a few customer needing upgrades to their equipment and then it would all be flipped over to the new security.

I personally can't wait for that to happen, it can't happen soon enough.

It will be great to shut down the Dish pirates. Maybe FTA can get it's good name back then.

 

[Anole]

anybody recognize...?

ON TV was awesome in it's day. I subscribed to it, cost $24.95 a month, kept it till they went off the air. It was a lot simpler to decode than the oak orion system, that was gated sync. ON was a sinewave system. Two 1458 op amps did most of the video work and a 565 PLL chip decoded the audio. Plans were all over the place back in the day.

I think we had two OTA pay-TV systems back in the 80's.
I'm sure we had one called ON.

Not sure what the other was... but I seem to remember it was on channel 22.
They may have had positive sync (but that doesn't sound right...).

What I do remember is they inverted the picture (black for white) for a few seconds, then un-inverted it for a while.
An engineer friend described a large board of electronics and switches he built to decode it.
A three-bit or four-bit number was transmitted on line 22 (?) and then looked up by the decoder to determine whether to invert or not invert this particular frame.

Perhaps it was called: Select TV...?
Wow, it's been so many years!
But, it's enjoyable to dredge up these memories. -

 

[tvropro]

I think we had two OTA pay-TV systems back in the 80's.
I'm sure we had one called ON.

Not sure what the other was... but I seem to remember it was on channel 22.
They may have had positive sync (but that doesn't sound right...).

What I do remember is they inverted the picture (black for white) for a few seconds, then un-inverted it for a while.
An engineer friend described a large board of electronics and switches he built to decode it.
A three-bit or four-bit number was transmitted on line 22 (?) and then looked up by the decoder to determine whether to invert or not invert this particular frame.

Perhaps it was called: Select TV...?
Wow, it's been so many years!
But, it's enjoyable to dredge up these memories. -

Sounds like either the Clarion system SelecTV used or Zenith SSAVI (suppressed sync active video inversion) system. They each inverted the video. Thinking more about it with your engineer friend description it sounds like the SSAVI, that was used on Spectrum and others. SelecTV I think only used the Clarion system.

Don't ask how I know so much about these But I was very interested at the time. An engineer friend of my brother actually designed and
built a circuit for the SSAVI and even etched his own boards. A company also sold kits later using the Zenith M1 tuner module that was used in the Zenith tv's at the time.

Cool memories

 

[Henry T]

You said it... It'd be nice to have a few HD boxes cheap.. Hopefully whatever comes up next on that end won't involve FTA boxes, and hopefully they won't try to call it FTA either..

I have always hated the name FTA; I still call it TVRO which is what it is.