Cable Company Accused Of Stealing EchoStar Programming
from the well,-look-at-that... dept
There have been plenty of stories of individuals illegally accessing satellite TV programming with hacked cards, but now, EchoStar is now accusing a small cable company of using a residential account to take their signal and deliver it to customers. EchoStar noticed their own dishes around a Mediacom transmission tower, and decided to conduct a little experiment. They sent investigators into the homes of Mediacom subscribers, while sending a specific test pattern to their own Dish Network - and the investigators videotaped the signal showing up on Mediacom subscriber's TVs. Seems like a pretty sneaky (and very, very illegal) way to get around paying the increasingly high costs that content providers are charging cable companies to carry their content.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
