Hard-Core FansSome Super Bowl viewers had their football interrupted by porn. It could happen to you, too!
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009, at 10:22 AM ETOn Sunday, Comcast cable customers in Tucson, Ariz., saw their Super Bowl interrupted by about half a minute of porn. Comcast says it is investigating the incident, which it called an "isolated malicious act," and has offered offended viewers a $10 credit. In June 2007, Josh Levin wrote about how porn (and other content) can show up on your TV screen even when you don't ask for it—the key is having the right equipment. The full article is reprinted below.
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I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV—their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography.
My career as a TV freeloader began when I threw together an HDTV setup a few months ago. To pull in locally broadcast HD channels, I bought a Samsung HD tuner and a set of rabbit ears. This setup was unstable—breathing on the antenna made the picture vanish. My girlfriend suggested that I try plugging in the Comcast cable line. (I get Comcast service but I don't have a cable box.) I screwed the cable in, and after performing the tuner's "auto channel search," I got all the D.C. and Baltimore broadcast networks in super-sharp HD.
But that wasn't all. Further up the dial, past PBS and the CW, I found a big clump of hyphenated channels. Channel 86-4 delivered an episode of The Sopranos—odd considering that I don't subscribe to HBO. The Leonardo DiCaprio movie Blood Diamond appeared on 87-5. And on 89-11 ... whoa, is that a nipple? These "premium" shows tended to appear and disappear in a flash—that Sopranos episode on 86-4 stayed on for five minutes, then transmogrified into The Devil Wears Prada. These programs also sometimes fast-forwarded and rewound spontaneously, as if an invisible hand were operating the remote.
At first, I assumed our tuner had formed a mind meld with a cable box a few apartments over. My girlfriend regaled our visitors with tales of our TV-obsessed neighbor, a heterosexual male who loved large-chested women and Hollywood blockbusters. But even the most ravenous viewer couldn't have this kind of appetite—some evenings I was getting free movies and porn on 20 channels at once.
I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At tech-y sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. Apparently, I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner.
To explain how my tuner harvested a TV bonanza, I need to give a short primer on cable-television tech. Generally speaking, if you subscribe to basic-cable service—a $10 per month plan for around 20 channels, or a plan that gives you, say, channels 2 through 70—you receive nothing but analog signals. For more channels, you've got to go digital.
Depending on your cable company, "digital cable" service typically includes a mix of analog channels and channels sent digitally. QAM, or quadrature amplitude modulation, is the "modulation scheme" that cable companies use to transmit digital channels. Set-top boxes leased out by cable TV companies allow viewers to tune in to "QAM-ed" channels. The number of channels you receive depends on what level of service you've subscribed for and what switches they've thrown at the cableco for your account.
If you don't have a cable box but do subscribe to cable, you can usually receive some digital cable if your television or TV receiver has built-in QAM support. A standalone QAM tuner, however, will let you tune in only unencrypted digital channels.
Which digital channels are unencrypted? Most cable companies don't encrypt the digital signals that they pick up from local broadcasters. That explains why I get the HD versions of Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC, CW, and PBS. My tuner also fields unencrypted digital channels that aren't broadcast in HD, like the local NBC affiliate's 24-hour weather radar and a music-video channel called The Tube. Cable companies encrypt premium channels like HBO, ESPN-HD, and BBC America to prevent nonsubscribers from getting a free ride. The reason I can watch all that hot on-demand stuff is because Comcast doesn't encrypt it.
Here's how VOD works: If you want to watch an old Sopranos episode, you click a button that tells your set-top box to transmit a message to a server at the local cable facility. The box receives a message back from the server identifying the frequency—say, channel 86-4—where the stream will start playing. Only this particular cable box gets the message about the frequency, but the show itself still gets transmitted to other people in your service area. According to Comcast, each of its cable "nodes" serves roughly 450 houses. So, when Joe Blow dials up Episode 67 of The Sopranos, the signal goes to 449 of his neighbors. They could watch along if the cable company doesn't encrypt the show (which Comcast doesn't here in D.C.), they know what channel to flip to, and they have a QAM tuner. If someone in my node makes an on-demand request for The Sopranos, all I have to do is scroll around in the upper-80s region of my tuner, and I'll find it.
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