i think there are a lot of receivers here in the us that have the access slot but if you look no reader installed. I know they are used widely in europe kinda like a pay by the month cell phone. so you could pop into your local wal-mart ( or whatever) and buy a card and insert it and have services ( i'm sure after a short activation call.... )
used to be we could say the usa was on the cutting edge of the tech market but now every other country is ahead of us in this aspect. i guess thats what you get when you have a proprietary products in a monopoly based Society.
example
we pay for our land based telephone only to have telemarketers call us .... on our phone and we have to tell them not to call...... this should be reversed and the companies & corperations should provide us with free home services and then let the telemarketers ( within reasonable limits) call. no currently i have sign up on a do not call list for something i pay for....!
another is like satellite tv
you pay for satellite service and have to endure tv commercials. shouldn't commericialized tv be free why then are the rates so high ? should only be paying a small fee for the satellite compnies to provide us commericial tv
another is DVD's you buy you pay $20 for a DVD only to watch several commercials of other movies .... we pay for it give us a choice put the movie commercials at the end of the movie ... or give me a cut rate on buying the DVD.
down of my soapbox
my point was we in north america have fallen behind the rest of the world and the card slots are used for several reasons.