🚀 go-pugleaf

I have just come home from a tense, angry meeting of a local cable TV
board. It occured to me that much of what was causing the tension
between the public representatives and the cable company ought to have
a technical solution.

For the sake of brevity, I won't go into the details of the current
issue, but it could be solved by "black boxes". (The cable company
isn't proposing to install them since when they tried a few years ago
they lost half their subscribers.) Now as I understand the objection
to these boxes, it is because the descrambled signals come out on
channel 3 and you have to select which channel you want to watch with
a switch or remote control special to the box. This prevents
unattended recording of shows on different channels by your VCR among
other things.

Now my question is: Why can't someone make a box that will take all
those channels coming in, descramble the ones you've subscribed to,
and put them all out at once on a cable to your tuner so the tuner can
do its thing?

Given the heat generated by this issue such a box should be a billion
dollar item, so I figure there must be some technical limitation that
makes it hard (I can't see any reason why it would be impossible). Can
someone enlighten me? I know nothing about how signals are scrambled,
but the description of the items being put in our lines indicated they
were strictly passive devices. What makes this problem hard?

Tim Sullivan (tims@infidel.lanl.gov)