uk sky cards and Foreign TV

toonarmy

is there any way to find out how much life is left in Sky Cards ?

watty

No.
They ALL work till Sky decide to do new cards. Then none work. Typically they would replace all cards at the same time, UK, Irish and FreeSat-from-Sky/FTV cards.

You may hope that the STUPID card hackers and card sharers find some better interest in Life than stealing Pay TV and putting up prices for all the honest subscribers.

toonarmy

i thought they all had a life span per card ... interesting ,

cheers;

d

watty

Sky can of course kill any card any time they want. Any "non-working" cards I ever heard of had just missed keys and worked after sitting in Box overnight.

There is no particular reason (lots of ones against) that they would have a fixed expiry date.

channelsurfer

the cards might last at least until 2008 but pure speculation. as watty says sky can decide to replace them tomorrow if they wish. I notice they are not on sale on ebay any more. is this an ebay crackdown or just lack of sellers?

byte

channelsurfer wrote:

the cards might last at least until 2008 but pure speculation. as watty says sky can decide to replace them tomorrow if they wish. I notice they are not on sale on ebay any more. is this an ebay crackdown or just lack of sellers?

I think Sky put the pressure on eBay to remove any listings for these cards, as it's illegal to sell them. The cards are always the property of BSkyB/NDS and as such, not yours to sell.

The cards will basically last until NDS think the security has been breached to an unacceptable extent.

jonnygee

The yellow house "solus" cards were provided by the bbc. The costs were covered by the licence fee as far as I can remember, still working as ftv card. What rights would sky have to turn off these cards as they were paid for by the bbc, not sky.

DMC

All solus cards were NDS cards, so it would be up to NDS to say what to do.

And iirc all solus cards were killed when Sky changed their cards?

Ulsterman 1690

It would be stupid to have a fixed lifespan on the cards

If NDS decided the cards were valid until (say) end 2008 and then someone managed to hack them in 2006 and post details on the internet $ky would be facing over two years of piracy on their system which could even include pay and premium channels.

If on the other hand come late 2008 there had been no large scale hack on the cards then replacing them would be a pointless expense.

The old pre-Freesat FTV cards were supplied by NDS under contract with the BBC (and for a short while Channel 4)

Sky themselves probably have no reason to care about the trade in grey market export or copied FTV cards but if The rights holders start to put pressure on Channels 4/5 and in turn $ky then they have to be seen to do something

toonarmy

byte wrote:

I think Sky put the pressure on eBay to remove any listings for these cards, as it's illegal to sell them. The cards are always the property of BSkyB/NDS and as such, not yours to sell.

The cards will basically last until NDS think the security has been breached to an unacceptable extent.

got one on ebay for €40 last week [compared to 70 sterling the last time thru a website]....having said that i was looking at another one last week on ebay that was suddenly taken off the market..?!

Ulsterman 1690

And iirc all solus cards were killed when Sky changed their cards?

A small number of version 2 cards were issued by (BBC and later Channel 4) which still work

watty

Indeed I think an upgrade was sent automatically to the UK address.

Technically it is illegal to buy & sell them as Sky/NDS own them (even the BBC card), hence they are always removed when spotted on eBay.

You can get it send to a UK address. Or have someone in the UK get it for you.


eBay is daft place to get them as you can easily be caught by the "I lost my card" scam.

Seller shifts card at profit. Waits a few days and then informs Sky it was broken/eaten/lost and gets another. Seller repeats trick sometime later. Perhaps to Flat 11B

All the lost/broken/eaten cards are removed from database, which causes them to stop working. Or Sky may sometimes send a "kill" command, I'm not sure. But if the card is simply removed from database it does stop working.

Ballyman

I got one from here two months ago cos I had bad withdrawl sympthoms without my racing on a saturday from C4!!

Working fine for me since. Did have to leave it in the box overnight for first use. Cost me €38

DMC

Ulsterman 1690 wrote:

A small number of version 2 cards were issued by (BBC and later Channel 4) which still work

Indeed, for a very short time before Sky issued them as Freesat-from-Sky cards. But no version one card survived the cull.

jonnygee

I wonder would sky pair a solus card to a different box if asked or would they disown them.

Ulsterman 1690

IIRC a card doesnt have to be paired to a box to get FTV channels.

Pairing is AFaIK used as a security measure for pay/premium channels only

Sky can of course kill any card any time they want.

What exactly does "kill"ing a card involve ?

I thought a card was disabled simply by $ky ceasing to transmit new keys for a particular card so that it becomes useless for viewing a particular channel after it changes keys (typically every few days or few hours in the case of PPV channels) If a system based purely on "Kill signals" it would be vunerable to hackers devising ways to remove the kill signal or modifying the decoder to ignore it.

Any "non-working" cards I ever heard of had just missed keys and worked after sitting in Box overnight

With the obvious exception of version one cards.

jonnygee

I think if the ftv card is paired to a box then maybe sky three is clear, well I was getting it clear on solus card until recently, now I get this is not correct card message. When I originally got the solus card it was paired to a box which has since deceased.

watty

Only BBC was ever paired on FTV cards. ITV were not. C4 and Five are not.

Indeed the card needs fresh keys all the time or stops working. It can take up to 24hrs to recover.

A killed card can't be renewed. I don't know if Sky can kill them or if they would bother. I suspect there is a mechanism disguised as a keep alive key that will only be launched once at future point in time. This would be a very very effective one time countermeasure. It may be possible to do this such that shared cards are especially vunerable. I know how I could kill all shared cards or even potentially the boxes driven by a shared card on a one time basis.

SRB

watty wrote:

You may hope that the STUPID card hackers and card sharers find some better interest in Life than stealing Pay TV and putting up prices for all the honest subscribers.

Personally, I rather hope one day we'll be able to subscribe LEGALLY to any providers package anywhere in Europe.

watty

SRB wrote:

Personally, I rather hope one day we'll be able to subscribe LEGALLY to any providers package anywhere in Europe.

You can today

It just requires multiple satellite receivers and is awkward to organise. But it is legal to have any providers package as long as it is the real card & sub. All thouse Euro Politicians in Brussels wanted to make sure they copuld legally bring their own card from home

SRB

Yes, but I can't in Ireland walk into a shop and subscribe to, say Canal Digiataal, giving my Irish address. I can go into to a shop in, say, Enschede, and take out a sub using a Dutch address and Dutch bank account, then bring the card back to Ireland with me, but that's not quite the point I was making. You should be able to subscribe to any package you want within the EU without having to do the above, or pay a shady middleman a silly amount of money to do it for you.

watty

SRB wrote:

Yes, but I can't in Ireland walk into a shop and subscribe to, say Canal Digiataal, giving my Irish address. I can go into to a shop in, say, Enschede, and take out a sub using a Dutch address and Dutch bank account, then bring the card back to Ireland with me, but that's not quite the point I was making. You should be able to subscribe to any package you want within the EU without having to do the above, or pay a shady middleman a silly amount of money to do it for you.

Oh agreed. But the issue is NOT legality. It is already perfectly legal. The problem is in the main "Hollywood" and "Sports" "rights providers" contracts with the broadcasters or broadcast distributors and their divide and conquor approach to selling the same thing multiple times to Europe.

You can subscribe to any package you want, but as you point out, it can be physcally awkward. However a budget plane flight and an accomodation address is often cheaper than "shady middlemen" (And entirely legal, in some cases the Middlemen are not legal) . Credit cards can be anywhere. Any supplier that insists on DD is more awkward.

These contracts don't involve the viewer* and any breaking of them is a civil matter (the "rights holder" has to sue). Some may be illegal. But who has the pockets deep enough to test them?

You don't need a foreign bank account generally. Lots of people have Sky subs with non-UK / Ireland credit cards.

We should compile a wiki/sticky of how to legally have various non-Sky subscriptions. Some will actually sell here.

It isn't just about football. For example many Polish people in Ireland want Polish TV and their equivalent of RTE1 &RTE2 etc is also only in a subscription pack..

I'm moving this to Foreign sat as even Sky is 100% Foreign

* Did you sign any agreement with the Premiereship blokes to watch Sky Sports? You pay for Sky Sports (or not), but have no say at all over the content or price. Despite whatever it might say on Sky T&C you can use your card anywhere. Infact Sky know they have many mainland Europe & North Africa subs and unless you actually tell them (at which point they become in breach of their suppliers' contracts) they really don't care. Sky's obligation (and that of other operators) to satisfy the "rights" holders is simply to limit geographic sale. Encryption and Operators care nothing about where it is viewed as long as the account address meets the "rights suppliers" inflicted rules.