Here is something interesting for Roku owners: CBC News Network, Canada's 24/7 news station

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Hat tip, the DCRTV.com mailbag for April 16

Here is something interesting for Roku owners. If you use this private code, 6DRC595, on the roku.com page in your account, you get something called the Free2View app. It has almost nothing I care about, EXCEPT, all the way to the right, there is a "Bonus" icon, and it's the CBC News Network, Canada's 24/7 news station, temporarily available to non-cable viewers and all over the world, during these times. And this is the only way I found to view it. Polite, factual, no teasers, just news and Canadian TV commercials. They do repeat "The National", the big 1-hour news show, all evening long, which is what they always do. Enjoy it, Roku users. -- Carl in Olney (4/16/20)

[hlthe2b]

1. great tip! Thanks

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. It used to be the case many years ago that, if you had one of those huge satellite dishes,

and you lived far enough north, you were in the footprint, so to speak of unencrypted CBC TV broadcasts. You could watch the Olympics without the annoying and distracting segments NBC inserted. I have no idea if this is still possible.

Is the “big ugly dish” dead?

FILED UNDER: SATELLITE

POSTED BY: STUART SWEET OCTOBER 29, 2017

Spoiler alert: Yes.

It may have been all the rage when Radio Shack put it on the cover back in 1986, but the C-Band satellite, also known as the “Big Ugly Dish,” is really a thing of the past. If you see these around town, you’ll probably notice a lot of them have grass growing up through them, and even more have a smaller satellite dish next to them. Why has C-Band satellite disappeared?

One word: Encryption.

There was a time when every broadcaster put its satellite feed up completely “Free to air” in other words, unencrypted. Why would they worry about it after all, when the only people who could receive the signals were cable companies and other broadcasters? Unfortunately, by the late 1980s plenty of people started to put up home-based satellite setups. They weren’t very good, and every satellite had to be tuned individually, but if you knew where to look you could find premium channel programming, local news feeds, in fact almost everything you could find on cable TV could also be found for free on a satellite.

Obviously that couldn’t last long. If everyone had a satellite dish then cable companies couldn’t make money. The answer was simple: encrypt the signal so that you had to pay to decrypt it. It took some wrangling to make sure this was legal, but once the stage was set, every broadcaster started moving to encrypted feeds for anything that was worth money.

{snip}