Free To Air - over 2 million users
Free To Air - over 2 million users
Over 2 million satellite tv pirates in North America
Thursday, 16 August 2007
A recent report from The Carmel Group entitled "Getting a Free Bird"
estimates that more than 2 million homes in North America are now
pirating
Bell ExpressVu and Dish Network Direct-to-Home (DTH)
satellite television signals.
Digital Home reviewed the findings of the report and believes them to
be accurate thanks to the novel approach the research company took to
derive the numbers.
Rather than relying on crude industry estimates, which are typically
inflated by satellite providers hoping for government largesse, the
Carmel Group derived its estimates by tallying up the number of free-
to-air (FTA) set-top boxes that have been sold in North America.
At this point the uninitiated reader may be asking what the sales of
FTA set top boxes have to do with satellite piracy. To answer that, we
must take a step back to April 2004.
In 2003 and 2004,
DirecTV, the largest DTH satellite provider in North
America was under attacked. At the time it was estimated that over two
million people in Canada and the United States were hacking its
system. In April of 2004, to stem the damage,
Directv implemented an
advanced encryption system that eliminated the pirating of its
signals. In the intervening years, the
Directv system has remained
secure.
In late 2004 and 2005, once the hackers realized the
Directv system
was going to remain secure, they turned their sites on systems made by
Echostar. The company, which owns the Dish network also supplies
satellite receivers for ExpressVu in Canada.
During that time the satellite hackers found a new way to steal
programming by reprogramming an off the shelf Free to Air (FTA)
satellite receiver. For about $200, pirates could buy an FTA receiver,
reprogram with software readily available on the web and receive every
channel broadcast by either ExpressVu or DISH network.
The
Echostar and ExpressVu systems had been hacked prior to April 2004
but various Electronic countermeasures (ECMs) by the company along
with a much vaunted
card swap had made the process quite expensive and
difficult. The FTA hack introduced sometime in late 2004 and early
2005 meant that hackers could steal signals without having to buy a
Dish or ExpressVu satellite receiver and having it reprogrammed.
Once the FTA hack became known, FTA receiver sales skyrocketed. In a
previous article, Digital Home had estimated that, in 2005 and early
2006, about 50,000 FTA boxes a month were being sold to pirates.
Prior to this hack, FTA receivers were generally sold in very small
quantities, typically to recent North American immigrants who used
them to receive unencrypted FTA programming from overseas. The number
sold in Canada each month before the hack would have been in the
hundreds. This means the vast majority of FTA set-top boxes sold since
late 2004 were being used to pirate ExpressVu and
DISH programming and
not to receive foreign language programming from Europe and the Mid-
East.
In order to accurately gauge the amount of FTA piracy, the Carmel
group contacted the leading manufacturers of FTA receivers and asked
them nearly a dozen questions including how many units they had
shipped, price points and their predictions for the future.
Over Two Million Units Shipped
The Carmel Group found that the top 3 FTA providers - Pansat, CoolSat
and Forsat - had shipped an estimated 1.385 million units with sales
of over $200 million U.S.
Pansat was the leader with 650,000 units sold followed by Coolsat
(460,000) and Mississauga based Fortec (325,000). Combined with the
next five biggest manufacturers - Viewsat, Dreambox,
Ariza, DigiWave
and Metabox), the top eight FTA manufacturers told the Carmel Group
that they have shipped an estimated 2,070,000 set top boxes in North
America for a combined value of almost $350 million U.S.
The research firm estimates the top eight manufacturers account for
about 75% of the total FTA industry in North America which suggests
the actual number of pirates is likely to be much greater than 2
million and perhaps as high as 2.5 million.
The Carmel Groups research also suggests the growth in the number of
satellite pirates is continuing to grow. The top eight manufacturers
reported that sales in the second quarter of 2007 were up over 10%!
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