
The news that Chinese technology company GoTech was “disinvited” from the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) trade show in the Netherlands last month after conditional access technology provider Nagravision won a $100 million lawsuit against the Chinese company in Texas for manufacturing set top boxes designed to circumvent access controls for Pay-TV platforms brought back memories of the long saga fought by satellite providers in Canada to stop illegal accessing of DirecTV’s satellite signal by Canadians. Given that DirecTV is not licensed to distribute content in Canada, a variety of devious means were used to “trick” the system into believing that the Canadian subscriber resided in the US, usually aided by middle-men who exploited the grey market by setting up accounts in the US, and then selling them in Canada. Given the footprint of DirecTV’s satellite, the signal is easily received in many parts of Canada. It required some technical tweaking to ensure the receiver was properly tuned, but that was part of the “service” provided. Continue reading “Content in the Sky and in the Cloud: It’s Not Free”