Sky have managed to become a virtual monopoly of pay TV by restricting the manufacture of their receivers and limiting the use of them to receive other satellites. In the rest of the EU it is possible to purchase most different makes of receivers and merely purchase a viewing card from an agent or the TV company. It is impossible to do this in the UK: you buy a Sky box or you cannot receive the Sky bouquet of channels.
It has also been suggested that Sky were responsible for the demise of On Digital through the dirty tricks of another Sky company, NDS, who leaked details of the encryption of On Digital's cards. Thus, there were more pirate cards than subscriptions and On Digital finally ceased.
The allegations are not new, but Panorama had tracked down Lee Gidding, the man behind The House of Ill Compute (or THOIC), which N.DS admit was taken over after its own security unit in Israel had found Gidding trying to hack Sky cards. N.DS says THOIC was used as a tool to track and catch more hackers, Gidding alleges it was fed On Digital codes and encouraged to leak them as far and wide as possible.
The cards used by On Digital and then ITV Digital were from Canal+ Technologies and were widely compromised. N.DS never denied hacking rival cards – which is legitimate practice – but strenuously denies distributing the resulting codes and thereby undermining rivals in the market. Canal Plus sued N.DS, but the case was settled when News Corp bought out and broke up Canal Plus Technologies.
Last edited by: Robbie34 on Mon 10 Sep 12 at 12:12
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