Free-to-Air TV and Radio?

ChiaBen asks: "I was visiting a friend recently who has a Free-to-air satellite receiver. It allows him to pick up any free satellite TV and radio programs, along with many pay-to-view (requires a payment, of course) programs. Nokia has a receiver, and I'd like to know if else is making similar hardware. It seems interesting, but before I drop a few hundred bones on one, I'd like to know what everyone has to say about it?"

Comments

Re:free to air tv and radio, if you steal it!

[ebooher]

I'm trying to assume that you are making a joke here. Yet, I'm not so sure that's how you mean this to be taken.

Free to Air or FTA Satellite TV has nothing to do with stealing content. The systems and broadcasters that want to protect their content have, using multiple encryption schemes. But there are birds up there that still have plenty of unscrambled content on them. It is *exactly* the same as putting an arial on your roof and receiving your local TV stations directly and telling your cable company to take a long walk.

This has nothing to do with trying to force / crack security ala DirecTV access cards to receive pay content for nothing. Please note the difference.

Big dish still lives

[bigbigbison]

If you want non-English language programming or local programming, there is still tons of stuff being broadcast for free from satellites. Satellite Guys is one of the best sources for info. Check out their forums, specifically the Free to Air one. Here's a list of what is available up there for free.

Get a DVB-S card

[evilviper]

Forget a stand-alone reciever. They're very inflexible, and a bit expensive for what you get.

Meanwhile, a PCI DVB-S card can be as cheap as $50, and with software decoding, you can play 4:2:2 streams, HDTV streams, free IP access from some satellites, and you don't need to worry about whether or not the reciever manufacturer will fix any bugs in it's firmware, or whether or not one reciever has an difficult to use menu system, etc.

Disclaimer: I don't have either, but I've been looking at info all around the net (user reviews, forums, etc), deciding the same thing myself, over the past few weeks.