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
Each subscriber had a set top box. That set top box received EVERY channel that the cable company was capable of sending. However if a channel was a premium channel like HBO or a Pay-Per-view channel, that channel was scrambled. It was not like encryption, but a simple and yes, analog, scrambling of the video information. Often the audio channel was unscrambled. So us older folks who were teens back during the 80’s could tune into a movie on Cinemax even though we didnt pay for it. But it was *almost* unwatchable. But it would momentarily and randomly allow you to get a brief glimpse of some titties. If a subscriber called the cable company and asked for a Pay-Per-View event like a boxing match, the billing system would send batches of these analog token requests out on their cable networks. The set top box had an identification code like a serial number in its electronics. If that code matched up with a permitted list then that channel would now have the key to unscramble the channel, not because the subscriber had a different analog transmission, but because the set top box had the code to unlock that scrambled transmission. After a Pay-Per-View event a code would be sent out from the cable company to re-scramble that particular channel.
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