[illumin8]

I was heavily involved in that world in the late 90s to early 2000s, before DirecTV made it almost impossible.

I remember showing a couple friends of mine how to flash cards with a DB9 serial port card programmer. You could get every channel, including PPV and porn. I never wanted to do anything illegal except watch TV and movies, but a couple friends of mine had highly successful "satellite TV installation businesses" where they would install for legitimate DirecTV customers, then say "you know, for a couple hundred bucks I can unlock all the channels..."

It was a fun time, and what made it interesting was the cat and mouse game that DirecTV played with the hackers. We had cards working for months, but at some points in time you had to get new updates every few days to keep it working. Eventually it became impossible, but it's been over a decade so I can't remember what the final event was.

[codezero]

From a bit of googling, it seems like it stopped because online piracy became faster and easier than decryption and hardware hacking.