How does a satellite account get verified?
Not exactly keeping me awake at night, but I am curious about how a satellite provider (DISH, Sirius, etc.) validates that a legal device is connecting and determines what services are available to th...
Forum Discussion
GordonThree wrote:
There's no way the set top box is broadcasting to the satellites. Not that it's technologically impossible but it would add a lot of costs for little benefit to the company. Take a look at the weird LNB used by satellite Internet setups.
I've never had a red button receiver, but my guess is there's an amount of side-band info like weather, news headlines, etc being downloaded alongside the video and the button toggles a display filtered by details from your account information.
VOD and apps like the weather, etc., use an Internet connection when available to download the requested data or program. The weather app for instance lets you enter specific ZIP codes that you want the info for. There's no practical way the weather data specific to all 43,000 or so ZIP codes could be kept updated on a sideband sat signal just in case you happen to select a given ZIP or ZIP's. An easy test to prove that would be to just turn off the available Internet source and then try to access updated app data.
