By cable box, I am referring to my set-top box with a smart card.
I have a satellite TV connection where I can subscribe to channels, and they update every month.
If I haven’t paid for a specific month, my connection stops working, and I am told to pay on my TV screen.
From what I have been told, the connection is mainly one way – the satellite is broadcasting information to my receiver, and it broadcasts the same signal to everyone, and my set top box can decode it using its smart card, which contains some sort of encryption key.
If the same signal is sent to everyone, is the encryption key the same? And how does my set-top box know which channels I have subscribed to? Is every user’s list of channels broadcasted to everyone?
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It depends on the implementation for your specific company, with some of them they rely on a literal phone call data transmission to renew your encryption key, others are bouncing the data directly off the satelite to update your box. Satelite TV in itself is a similar principal to cable, where the transmission to everyone is identical, and the box itself is what’s needed for viewing the signal, and in your case, identifying that you’ve subscribed to the specific channel you’re trying to view at that time.
This is being replaced more and more, with the “video on demand” style of box, which is using a system more similar to the internet, to request for download, what ever your watching. This is easier to secure, as your box itself is specifically having to ask for what it wants, and the signal is then sent to it. Some companies use a hybrid of these systems for live/VoD channels and transmissions.
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