Mobile DTV on the cheap

[Robert Stratton]

Pay OTA services aren't all that new, at least in the DC area. 

Channel 50 here in the the DC market used to sell a nighttime SSAVI-scrambled naughty movie service. Interestingly it happened to be the same type of scrambling (I won't dignify it by calling it "encryption") that Cox used for their local CATV service. My understanding is that when the pay service failed, the market was flooded with descramblers that didn't get returned. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a motivation for Cox to migrate to something a little more robust in the content protection department.

It was fascinating to watch them flip the switch from their infomercial-saturated daily schedule. Some nights they would forget for a little while, which may well have been a marketing method. I should probably look to see how many FCC complaints were filed when that happened and people accidentally stumbled across people in flagrante delicto on their TV.

--Bob S.

----- Original Message -----
> So much for FREE OTA TV.
> 
> --chip
> 
> On Jan 8, 2011, at 10:19 AM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:
> 
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 20:50:45 -0600 (CST)
> > From: Robert Stratton <bob at stratton.net>
> > Subject: Re: Mobile DTV on the cheap
> > [...]
> > One thing of which to be aware - some of the ATSC-M/H streams are
> > encrypted. There are two competing ventures of content providers and
> > broadcasters to try to develop pay services on top of Mobile DTV.
> > It's possible that you'll see streams in the software that it might
> > not be able to render because of encryption.
> > [...]
> > --Bob
> 
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-- 
--Bob S.