A little picture for those of you in the television business or who have worked at network affiliates back in the day:
http://www.akdart.com/vtr/jpeg/RB-324.jpg
The picture in the link above is of KDFW-TV's satellite room circa late 1980s, back during their days as a CBS affiliate. If you'll notice closely on the second rack from the left side, above a monitor, is a Videocipher descrambler. However, as I've mentioned this was from a CBS affiliate.
Am I safe to assume that the Videocipher decoder in the rack in that picture would be one of the Videocipher IB decoders that CBS shipped to their affiliates back in the post-1987 era when they began encrypting their Telstar 301/302 affiliate feeds? It looks to be the same design as a Cable company VC2/VC2+ decoder unit, and I've never seen a VC-I/IB decoder unit and strangely there have been no pictures of such floating around the internet (plenty of VC2/VC2+/VC-RS modules). It would be unlikely that any network affiliate would have a commercial VC2 decoder unit as part of their network reception gear....except possibly for reception of CNN, and I don't recall KDFW ever carrying CNN programming.
Just curious to know.
http://www.akdart.com/vtr/jpeg/RB-324.jpg
The picture in the link above is of KDFW-TV's satellite room circa late 1980s, back during their days as a CBS affiliate. If you'll notice closely on the second rack from the left side, above a monitor, is a Videocipher descrambler. However, as I've mentioned this was from a CBS affiliate.
Am I safe to assume that the Videocipher decoder in the rack in that picture would be one of the Videocipher IB decoders that CBS shipped to their affiliates back in the post-1987 era when they began encrypting their Telstar 301/302 affiliate feeds? It looks to be the same design as a Cable company VC2/VC2+ decoder unit, and I've never seen a VC-I/IB decoder unit and strangely there have been no pictures of such floating around the internet (plenty of VC2/VC2+/VC-RS modules). It would be unlikely that any network affiliate would have a commercial VC2 decoder unit as part of their network reception gear....except possibly for reception of CNN, and I don't recall KDFW ever carrying CNN programming.
Just curious to know.