Talk:Television encryption

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The Leitch system mentioned in the Older television encryption systems section of this article was also called Viewguard (I know this for a fact, I work at the facilities of 2 local affiliates for ABC and Fox respectively (both affiliates are in the same building) that have Leitch Viewguard descramblers installed for analog satellite feeds from both networks, although Fox has phased theirs out recently).

The Leitch Viewguard system works exactly like how the first VideoCipher I system worked, by re-ordering the lines of video, but leaving the audio intact and listenable (according to the description for VideoCipher I in the Videocipher article). It's quite different from the Viewguard system listed in this article... Is this possibly some other system sharing the same name, or has the original author of the article confused things...?

misternuvistor 07:47, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

-- Possibly. I'd have to dig out some of my satellite TV/scrambling books from the period to be absolutely sure. The VCI system was too expensive to deploy at the time (from what I remember). The line shuffle technique was only beginning to be introduced. The VideoCiper II system, which I think was the mass market product was cheaper and it just inverted the video, changed the level of the colour burst and hard encrypted the digitised audio using DES. --Jmccormac 08:34, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup Suggested

Overall style and flow are poor; narrative is generally unpolished. algocu 20:46, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

When techies write, you don't generally get great works of literature. As for the narrative aspect, this is an encyclopedia entry rather than a definitive history.--Jmccormac 06:04, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

No desire to get into a flame war, however:

• Removing "cleanup" is not a minor edit. The article is need of cleanup.
• The sentence "Pay television has always emphasized the idea of making the subscriber pay" is patently absurd in its obviousness. Pay television exists by virtue of subscriber revenue. If not, it would not be "pay television."
• Replacing the revised sentence with the original does not aid the reader. Perhaps it would be better to say, "Pay television derives its revenue through a combination of subscription fees and pay-per-view purchases."
• There are a great many literate technologists. algocu 16:22, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Well it will just have to be cleaned up then. As for the obviousness of the first sentence, nothing is obvious when it comes to encyclopedia entries. That is why it is important to get that point firmly embedded in the reader's mind because it underlies everything that follows.

Pay television exists to make revenue from subscribers and sometimes those subscribers don't pay. In fact the problem of piracy on cable and satellite networks is a rather important one and it has been one of the main factors in the development of Pay TV systems.

It has been over ten years since I wrote about television encryption systems. I have added to various sections on this article and tried not to obliterate the work of others. It would be easy enough for me to post hundreds of pages of articles on Pay TV systems and the underlying theory but this is an encyclopedia entry rather than a reference book on systems. The Pirate decryption entry contains a lot of history and detail that could arguably be included in this one. However the problem is that Pay TV evolved largely in parallel in the US and Europe. To write a complete article on it will take some time. --Jmccormac 17:04, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Suggest replacing "Pay television has always emphasized..." with your text above: "Pay television exists to make revenue from subscribers and sometimes those subscribers don't pay. In fact the problem of piracy on cable and satellite networks is a rather important one and it has been one of the main factors in the development of Pay TV systems."

Suggest re-inserting "cleanup" or similar template. --algocu 17:29, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Well the clean up is in progress so let's not distract all the nice readers. I've added a modified opening paragraph based on the above. I might transpose some of the stuff from European Scrambling Systems (cited as a reference in some articles here) into the article to provide some background theory.--Jmccormac 11:50, 5 April 2007 (UTC)