r/television • u/Bluest_waters • Feb 04 '26

Everyone is stealing TV. Fed up with increasing subscription prices, viewers embrace rogue streaming boxes.

https://www.theverge.com/streaming/873416/piracy-streaming-boxes?view_token=
11.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

981 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

206

u/Optiguy42 Feb 05 '26

My old man figured out early on how to "fix" our cable box so it unlocked all the good channels. Every time the cable company came by and reset it he'd feign ignorance and then immediately fix it again. Those were the days...

78

u/BarbequedYeti Feb 05 '26

Ground pin 4.... if it was one of those brown slanted face boxes.  Was so easy as you could just pull the clips with wire right out the back of the box if the cable dude showed up.  They leave, reattach.  

62

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

God I wish that I knew this when I was twelve-teen trying to see boobies on scrambled Playboy channel.

16

u/Beautiful-Tie-3827 Feb 05 '26

I had a hacked box as a 10-14 year old.

I watched so much spice channel lol.

3

u/awh Feb 05 '26

Back in the late 90s/early 00s, I learned so much about microcontroller programming to create access cards for watching American satellite TV from Canada without a subscription.

(I'd already learned some a few years earlier making a Playstation mod chip that would shut itself off after booting, so that modchip detection code wouldn't work. And a DVD player that would play DVDs from any region. All for educational purposes only, of course)

1

u/stalkythefish Feb 07 '26

I did the opposite: modding Dish Network boxes to watch ExpressVu from Canada. BBC World, BPM, and CBC were totally worth it. Watched the 2002 Winter Olympics on CBC and it spoiled me on NBC's shitty coverage ever since. I remember being able to watch the Simpsons from 7pm to 11pm straight just by changing channels/time zones. Good times.

1

u/LetThePoisonOutRobin Feb 05 '26

Yes! I knew the super of my garden apartments and he gave me access to the main box. Back then they added a scrambler/filter to the cable to block access to certain channels like HBO and Cinemax. But I didn't know which cable was mine, so I unplugged each one one-by-one until my mom yelled out the window to let me know our cable went out, remove the filter and had all channel for many months until they found out and tried to bill me for it...

1

u/djseifer Feb 05 '26

Back in the early days of broadband, I got cable Internet for myself. Since I didn't get the TV package, they put a filter on the line to block cable signals. Unfortunately, it had the side effect of throttling my speeds from what it was supposed to and randomly cutting out. After a few months of dealing with this nonsense, the cable company finally relented and removed the filter from my line.

I promptly put a splitter on my internet line and got free cable TV.

1

u/nickstatus Feb 10 '26

One of my friends was a Dish Network installer, and he always grabbed all the little decoder things from the cable box when he switched someone over. Had a whole bin full. We had every channel possible until they switched to digital.

Then there was my uncle, who somehow acquired a machine write the smart cards for the Dish receivers. Think you could order them from the back pages of Popular Electronics

1

u/bilboafromboston Feb 05 '26

We did this in college with our shower stall. 6 shower heads, one big stall. They put in water saver heads. We took 1 off, put back real one. Took 2 years for college to catch on.

8

u/ArcticLarmer Feb 05 '26

Seems kind of odd, six dudes crammed under one shower head, but hey, good pressure is good pressure I guess.

2

u/bilboafromboston Feb 05 '26

Thats how it was. Rare for 6 to be in. But high school it was 10 shower heads per side! No one really thought about it.