Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 15, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
With the commercially available Russian satellite receiver “Opticum 4000c” and the appropriate illegal software, it is child’s play for insiders to receive paid television programmes such as Premiere for free. The so-called “free-to-air” device is recommended for this purpose above all in relevant Internet forums, as the magazine Computerbild reports in its current issue. The advantage of the device is its “open operating system”, which skilled programmers can easily rewrite in order to receive pay-TV channels without a customer card and without payment.
However, the Opticum devices are also attractive for those who cannot program themselves, because several ready-made software versions are already circulating on the Internet. Anyone who obtains information in the right forums has no problems finding the homepages for downloading. Only transferring from a PC to the Opticum box then still requires computer skills. A test by the magazine Computerbild showed that some dealers even pre-install this software at the request of their customers, although the distribution of these programs is illegal.
Premiere too can be cracked with the Opticum box. The fact that the broadcaster has frequently changed its access codes for a year poses no obstacle, because the Opticum receiver automatically reloads the new codes. The broadcaster took this apparently only partially effective measure after its “Nagravision” encryption was cracked by hackers a year ago. The company did not want to disclose which long-term strategy Premiere plans to pursue against television pirates.
