As in what technologies did they use and how did they logistically made it happen back then?
From what I could gather pay per view cable TV has been around since 60s – 70s. So for most of its existence it must have been using analog technologies right?
How did they deal with encryption and on-demand decryption then to allow for pay per view service to exist so earily?
I found out they must have used some kind of ‘scrambler’ as in some secondary device that was supposed to decrypt the signal from cable and feed it to the TV. But I assume scrambler was getting an analog signal right? so how did that analog encryption even work? And secondly, how did it even allow for on-demand decryption?
I mean, they couldn’t just – I don’t know – just tell me a password to unlock some encrypted channel could they? Were they mailing/selling some analog decrypting cards weeks before event or something?
In: Technology
>I found out they must have used some kind of ‘scrambler’ as in some secondary device that was supposed to decrypt the signal from cable and feed it to the TV. But I assume scrambler was getting an analog signal right? so how did that analog encryption even work?
Like the name implies, it was not really an encryption, but signal scrambling. Which means, the signal that you got from your TV line was just somehow altered (e.g. frequencies/phases of the signal shifted) such that displaying it on a TV directly was not possible anymore. Such scrambling is of course not very secure and often possible to reverse engineer in contrast to modern digital encryption.
> And secondly, how did it even allow for on-demand decryption? I mean, they couldn’t just – I don’t know – just tell me a password to unlock some encrypted channel could they? Were they mailing/selling some analog decrypting cards weeks before event or something?
Yes, this is one possible way. The technique how the signal was scrambled could be changed for each TV event and they would send out descrambler cards for that exact event via mail.
More sophisticated descramblers later in time could also be activated/deactivated remotely via the TV signal (they would send digital, encrypted commands for this in addition to the analog, scrambled TV signal)
Latest Answers