A lot of what happened is the cable companies and programmers finally got what they wanted, the demise of TVRO. First they tried scrambling, and high prices for programming in 1986, in many cases when scrambling first started, if you were in a cabled area, you had to buy from the cable company. Of course, cracking the VCII and M/A-Com/General Instrument support (lack of doing anything to secure) of it eventually lead to cheaper and reasonable 3rd party packages and programming prices by the early '90s. While the introduction of DSS in 1994 and Dish Network in 1996 didn't necessarily help TVRO sales, the death nail for TVRO came though in about 1997 when Dish introduced the $199 satellite system, and DSS/DirecTV soon followed, that was the end of the line. Also G.I didn't help matters by delaying the introduction of DigiCipher over and over and over, and then when they finally released it as 4DTV, they claimed it couldn't be a standalone module, that you had to give up your Drake or Tracker or Monterrey. Then when it (4DTV) flopped, as a last ditch effort G.I. comes out with the 905 sidecar. Now, in order to get cable programming, we are chained to DBS or Cable, and have to take what they give us. No longer have the choice that TVRO gave us. Of course, I'm beating a horse that has long since been dead.