Forgive my ignorance as I've never had satellite tv and have barely even touched the controls.
I presume if you have service to more than one tv you have a box by each both fed from the dish & LNB via a cable splitter.
So can someone take one of their boxes to another location and hook it to another dish/LNB and still be part of the original service without a 2nd subscription?
Again, I am showing my ignorance but these things are downlinks only, right? What do they do about pay per view?
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Also, as a separate but related matter, with cable tv moving towards almost all channels being scrambled and mandatory use of a converter box as gatekeeper what happens if you take such a box (already activated) to another location on the same cable system. I'm going to guess if you take it next door the system has no clue. But I don't know how widely spread each location is getting exactly the same signal so maybe a block away it works but across town it would be on a different node or something and not work?
Yes, I know it sounds like I'm planning to cheat in some way but I'm really more just curious. Guess I'm wondering why more people don't share subscriptions if it's technically feasible.
It's technically a "multiswitch", not just a passive splitter. You usually need to have a dual-LNB dish in order to do this at all, because the two boxes may need to be receiving signals which are not only on different frequencies, but which are on opposite polarizations (and a single LNB can only receive one polarization at a time).
Many of the newer dishes have multiple LNBs built in, and a "single cable" frequency stacking arrangement which only requires running one cable from the dish to the switch ("splitter").
Well, there's technical "can" (will it work) and business / legal / contractual "can" (is it permitted / authorized?)
To the latter point first: with most satellite companies, this is definitely not allowed by the contract. The account/licensing is for a "single household" usage only, and may not be shared with another household. In some cases I think they even may not allow "second home" sharing (e.g. primary home and a vacation home/cabin) on the same account, although I'm not all that sure of this... it may vary by the company. Breaking this rule is technically a form of "theft of services", and those who are caught at it can be faced with civil suits for damages and perhaps even face criminal charges (the latter is not common but it has happened).
Now, on a technical level... yes, this often will work, and a lot of people bend/break the rules by "lending" one of their secondary units to a friend or relative. During normal operation, the satellite boxes are downlink-only and don't have any sort of back-channel to the satellite provider... and so the provider may not be aware that one of the boxes has been moved.
Some satellite receivers insist on "calling home" periodically, either via phone line (typically a toll-free "800" number) or via the home's broadband Internet connection. If a satellite provider detects two receivers on a single account, "phoning home" from phone numbers at different locations, they may decide that this is a possible violation of the account contract. In this case they might deactivate one or more of the receivers, or insist on some sort of physical verification process to demonstrate that the receivers are in fact in the same home.
For pay-per-view, the satellite provider may require that the receiver be hooked up to a phone line (for ordering and for payment authorization), which would provide the phoning-location validation I just described. In other cases, PPV can be ordered and paid for by phone or Internet, and the authorization for it sent via the satellite... in which case a phone line connection may not be required.
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Dave Platt AE6EO
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AFAIK you can't share the satellite unless they would be in the same building. You could (you didn't hear it from me) share it with a next door neighbor. You can take your receiver (or smartcard) with you to a cottage or such. (at least you could in the past). I know of people (same family) their homes are a few hundred feet apart. They have the dual Dish receiver and a boosted signal for their second remote (UHF signal). No added cost for the 2nd house.
Since the subscription is usually attached to a card you must insert in the box, you can only watch one at a time so you could have multiple boxes and multiple TVs but since you have just one active card you would have to take the card with you to the one you want to watch. This of course assumes the card and box used by that particular provider are some standard so you can buy third party boxes compatible with the subscription. Another common setup is to send the output video from the box to other TVs in a home, either modulated in RF through a coaxial cable or by wireless video transmitters. As long as all the TVs are yours this should not be illegal.
Yes, you can connect your converter box to any dish pointed to the right satellite and it will work and they will not know unless you connect the box to a phone line and the box calls by phone so they could see its is calling from another number. I don't know if any control exists about the number the call originates from.
Huh? One at a time? Are you saying one can't call up Dish or Direct and say I have 2 TV's and I want service for both? I assume they then sell or rent you (whatever the deal is) two boxes and a dish and equipment suitable to drive both boxes. I further presume that one subscription for two TV's, while probably more costly than a single TV, would still be a lot less than two separate subscriptions.
Is that how pay per view works, it has to call in?
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