not good news sent to me by a mate

The information in this message is not hearsay, speculation, or rumour, but comes direct from the heart of Virgin Media technical operations at Hook, passed on by a contact who is informed, reliable and will remain strictly confidential (his/her job depends on it)

This week we have all experienced a sudden change in the way Virgin encrypts its premium channels. This post explains some facts and what's to come very very soon. It probably won't cheer you up. Sorry :-(

Remember when Virgin pulled Sky channels off their feed? That was a tough choice for Virgin. It hurt Virgin and it hurt Sky. The reduced ability to convert Sky customers over to Virgin and loss of advertising audience meant that both companies wanted to renegotiate terms. Ulimately Virgin wanted to get Sky channels back for the Christmas period but this was not straight forward because Sky was concerned about the high number of non-paying customers able to view Sky channels via the Virgin network. To be fair Virgin have also been concerned, but Sky forced them via the Terms and Conditions of supply to implement a comprehensive encryption system to lock out all non-paying customers before Christmas.

Hence many months ago was born 'Project Santa'!! An internal Virgin project to provide to its customers Sky channels with enhanced encryption before Christmas. The project has several important phases. Firstly there is new advertising, which you may have seen, warning customers about the illegality of certain pieces of equipment. Then there is direct mail warning some customers directly to disconnect equipment and coupled with telephone hotline to report offenders.

The next phase was to get Sky back on the feed. This was turned on in November successfully and has put Virgin in a much better position to recruit new customers in readiness for their Christmas programming. The final phase is to address encryption and security. This is more complicated because they want to secure the network but with little or no impact on paying customers. What you have all witnessed in the last week is the first step of the program with an interim Nagravision software upgrade which will soon move the whole Virgin tv network over to Nagravision version 3. Enabling rolling daily code changes is merely an early side effect of this implementation. Virgin knew that it would be circumvented quickly, but it was designed to de-stabalise the illicit set-top-box market before Christmas and wipe out a proportion of the existing usage for non-paying customers who do not have the expertise to remedy.

What you have not seen yet is the final step and cutover to full Nagravision V3 encoding. This requires all paying customers to be issued with a new card for their set-top-box and in some cases a firmware upgrade. This is no small operation. New cards are already in manufacture and a special Royal Mail contract for guaranteed delivery before Christmas has been signed. The recent software change has enabled very limited testing of N3 to be started in about 1000 individually selected customer endpoints. So an exact date for cutover is not decided as yet and will be determined by the recarding and testing work in progress. The deadline should be before Christmas. Although contingency is in place in the event of unforseen problems.

The bottom line is that N3 will go onto the Virgin TV network very soon and this will render all non-paying cutomers set-top-boxes useless for probably quite a long while. N3 is currently in use in several european tv networks and has not been circumvented to date. Whilst nothing is unbreakable, it will be measured in months rather than weeks and may require bespoke hardware rather than just a software fix.

I have every expectation that this post will be heavily flamed and rubbished. But have in mind, many of the readers / posters here make a living from selling set-top-boxes and they are hoping for a busy December as people ready themselves for a rich Christmas programming selection on cable tv. The last thing they want is for potential customers to hear what Virgin have planned for what will become a very expensive freeview box. Utimately time will tell.

are they not leaving it a bit late to get new cards to everyone before christmas i think it would cause so much disruption before christmas that paying viewers would not put up with it ,however i do belive that shortly it will have to happen as sky wont put up with there channels being viewed without paying for much longer, bring it on it gives us sumat to do

How do you expect anyone to read that when you put that Avatar up, I tried to read but couldn't take pull my eyes away LOL.

This isn't new and a wide spread post, I will reserve my coment and lets just wait and see, I have replied to these threads before and it doesn't get anyone anywhere.

Either way whatever happends we have had a good run.

Well, whatever happens...I have full faith in you guys to keep me up and running
Couldn't live without ye's ....and thats no joke!!

i hope it is wrong i was just posting what was emailed to me

V.M Nagra 3. Heard it all before and Im an ex enginenner with the previous idiots. V.M have their spies reading these sites, they have even tried to build up relationships with people over the web to get some fraction of details that might lead to a fraud charge. They are only fooling themsleves. I pay V.M enough everymonth and if I cant get the use of a ???????? box then there stuff will be getting tossed out the window. V.M will lose more customers if they start this crap and with the credit crunch and inadequate services of cable then they will be sorry losers. GIVE SKY BACK THEIR CHANNELS , SKY IS CRAP.

So Jimmy-Do you think that they will ever bring in N3 and, if they do, how easy is it to hack?

NOT GOOD NEWS AT ALL I JUST HOPE IT IS A RUMOUR

all i do know is that v.m are supplying new boxes for their freeview channels. thats from the gift horse mouth. these new boxes allow upto 45 free channels. where as the old samsung ones only get about 6 or so. i along with others hope it won't happen - but we will just have to wait and see. i agree get rid of sly basic channels they r pretty shite.

keep up the good work chaps

@lex wrote:How do you expect anyone to read that when you put that Avatar up, I tried to read but couldn't take pull my eyes away LOL.

Took me about 5 minutes tor ead the first paragraph, now I'm just gonna give up and go onto tube8.com lol

well av had ma moneys worth 2 year from clone happy days

ps nice cheeks