New Zealand's monopoly Pay TV service went dark for about 14 hours last night. The Sky TV outage was apparently due to an error positioning a satellite, but not helped by the fact that said satellite is running on a backup processor and is years out of its regular service life. One enterprising viewer is taking things into his own hands.
posted by pivotal on Mar 30, 2006 - 29 comments

ITV Digital is dead. I woke up this morning to find channel after channel replaced with a blue screen, telling me they can no longer broadcast pay-tv. Mtv UK are marking the occasion with lots of slow contemplative music. I want my Mtv! (and E4, UK Gold and ....)
posted by feelinglistless on Apr 30, 2002 - 12 comments

DirecTV takes a stand and VIA satellite, "killed pirated pieces of hardware that had enabled viewers in the U.S. and abroad to see a broad range of programming, including premium channels and pay-per-view events that they had not paid for." I didn't even know these pieces of hardware existed, but there are whole sites dedicated to satellite hacking which tell you what to do now if you had one of these. I hope if you have one of these cards you didn't have a Super Bowl Party planned.
posted by Mark on Jan 27, 2001 - 13 comments