Pay TV only began to become common after the widespread installation of cable television systems in the 1970s and 1980s; early premium channels were most often movie broadcasters such as the US-based Home Box Office and Cinemax, both currently owned by Warner Bros.
Early encryption attempts such as Videocipher II were common targets for pirate decryption as dismayed viewers saw large amounts of formerly-unencrypted programming vanishing.
Nowadays some free-to-air satellite content in the USA still remains, but many of the channels still in the clear are ethnic channels, local over-the-air TV stations, international broadcasters, religious programming, backfeeds of network programming destined to local TV stations or signals uplinked from mobile satellite trucks to provide live news and sports coverage.
In some European systems, the conditional-access module (CAM) which serves as a standardized interface between smartcard and DVB receiver has also been targeted for tampering or replaced by third-party hardware.
Two-way communication has also been used by designers of proprietary digital cable TV equipment in order to make tampering more difficult or easier to detect.
This leaves them in a situation where they must perform a card and encryption change with all legitimate viewers, in order to eliminate the viewing of the service without permission, at least for the foreseeable future.
Despite the unauthorised decryption of media being illegal in many countries, smart card piracy is a crime which is very rarely punished, due to it being virtually undetectable, particularly in the case of satellite viewing.
This has caused much confusion in places such as Europe, where the proximity of many countries, coupled with the large land mass covered by satellite beams, allows signal access to many different providers.
As the server must have individually subscribed smart cards for each channel to be viewed, its continued operation tends to be costly and may require multiple subscriptions under different names and addresses.
In February 2014, an episode of BBC's "Inside Out" disclosed that the complete Sky TV package could be obtained from black-market sources for as little as £10 per month through Internet key sharing, Swansea and Cardiff were highlighted with significant activity in pubs using cracked boxes to show Premier League football.
The refusal of most providers to knowingly issue subscriptions outside their home country leads to a situation where pirate decryption is perceived as being one of the few ways to obtain certain programming.
Pirate or grey-market reception also provides viewers a means to bypass local blackout restrictions on sporting events and to access hard-core pornography where some content is not otherwise available.
The grey market for US satellite receivers in Canada at one point was estimated to serve as many as several hundred thousand English-speaking Canadian households.
Domestic satellite and cable providers have adopted a strategy of judicial delay in which their legal counsel will file an endless series of otherwise-useless motions before the courts to ensure that the proponents of the grey-market systems run out of money before the "Charter Challenge" issue is decided.
[citation needed] According to K. William McKenzie, the Orillia Ontario lawyer who won the case in the Supreme Court of Canada, a consortium headed by David Fuss and supported by Dawn Branton and others later launched a constitutional challenge to defeat section 9(1)(c) of the Radiocommunication Act on the basis that it breached the guarantee of Freedom of Expression enshrined in section 2 (c) of the Canadian Charter of Rights.
The evidence compiled by Mr. McKenzie from his broadcasting clients in opposition to this challenge was so overwhelming that it was abandoned and the Court ordered that substantial costs be paid by the applicants.
In most cases, broadcast distributors will require a domestic billing address before issuing a subscription; post boxes and commercial mail receiving agencies are often used by grey-market subscribers to foreign providers to circumvent this restriction.
Signal substitution had already been the cause of strong diplomatic protests by the United States, which considers the practice to constitute theft of advertising revenue.
It could be said that the 1000-channel universe is a "reality" in North America, but only for the signal pirates as many legal and geographic restrictions are placed on the ability to subscribe to many if not most of the physically available channels.
But other satellite providers such as Sky Deutschland do sell yearly subscription cards legally to customers in other European countries without the need for an address or other personal information.
[6] It was in April 2019, when Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released a report placing Saudi Arabia on the Watch List.
As some equipment (such as a computer interface to communicate with standard ISO/IEC 7816 smartcards) is useful for other purposes, this approach has drawn strong opposition from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
There have also been US counter-suits alleging that the legal tactics used by some DBS providers to demand large amounts of money from end-users may themselves appear unlawful or border on extortion.
The results of a provider resorting to the use of malicious code are usually temporary at best, as knowledge of how to repair most damage tends to be distributed rapidly by hobbyists through various Internet forums.
Despite these efforts to secure their programming, a software hack was released in late August 2005, allowing for the decryption of the new Nagravision 2 channels with a DVB-S card and a PC.
Mullen was sentenced to seven years in prison with no parole and ordered to pay DirecTV and smart card provider NDS Ltd. US$24 million in restitution.
He pleaded guilty in a Tampa, Florida court in September 2003 after being arrested when he entered the United States using a British passport in the name "Martin Paul Stewart".
Testimony in the Florida court showed that he had a network of over 100 sub-dealers working for him and that during one six-week period, he cleared US$4.4 million in cash from re-programming DirecTV smartcards that had been damaged in an electronic counter measure.
In summer of 2003 when Mullen travelled under another identity to visit his operations in Florida, US federal authorities were waiting for him at the airport after being tipped off by Canadian investigators working for NDS Inc.
However, the NDS Group were accused (in several lawsuits) by Canal+ (dismissed as part of an otherwise-unrelated corporate takeover deal) and Echostar (now Dish Network) of hacking the Nagra encryption and releasing the information on the internet.