Better Late than never.....April fool

rolfw

Press release:

Olaf Lopri, Technical Director
BSkyB Plc
6 Centaurs Business Park
Grant Way
Isleworth TW7 5QD
United Kingdom

Reuters London. 01.04.02 1500.

BSkyB have unveiled their new regionally sensitive
smart card to be used in conjunction with their
digital services broadcast from the Luxembourg-owned
Astra satellite. The new card has been developed
jointly by the Hughes Corporation of America and NDS,
a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's
international media giant, News Corp.

The purpose of the new card is to limit reception to
only those viewers in territories where BSkyB hold
distribution rights for programme material and is in
response to increasing pressure by major US movie and
programme distributors for BSkyB to "put its house in
order".

Super VideoGuard, as the new scrambling system will
be known, uses Hughes' global positioning technology
based on the satellite navigation system that is in
use by thousands of weekend yachtsmen around the
world. For an undisclosed cost, Hughes have developed
a special GPS microchip and a sensitive receiving
antennae that is embedded in the laminations of the
new BSkyB digital smart card. It provides an
additional level of verification of viewers'
whereabouts by interrogating the co-ordinates
received by the card from the GPS navigation
satellites. Co-ordinates that are incorrect for the
UK and Eire, indicating that the new smart card is
being used outside BSkyB's licensed territory, will
result in the card turning itself off. Furthermore,
it will be possible for BSkyB to read information
from returned cards to determine within 100 metres
where it was being used when it was turned off.

Speaking at a press conference at BSkyB's West London
HQ today, their spokesman, Olaf Lopri, said that
viewers' will not have to replace their existing set-
top digital receivers. "All they will have to do is
swap their old card for the new cards that we will
sending out to our subscribers' registered addresses
over the next few months," he said in answer to
reporters' questions. He went on to say: "The GPS
satellite signals are very powerful. We have carried
out extensive tests at selected locations within the
UK and do not anticipate that our legitimate
subscribers will encounter any problems. Extensive
tests have also been carried out in Spain and other
parts of Europe not within our licensed territories
and a 99 per cent turn-off success rate has been
achieved."

BSkyB have refused to say how much the change-over
will cost but have stated that they expect to have
phased-out all the old non-regionally sensitive cards
by 01.04.03.

Acknowledgement___________________________________ ____________________________________
Text Lifted wholesale from alt,satellite.tv.europe 01 April 2002 16:41 Posted by James Follet. Bet it had a few bottoms twitching though.

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