I recall the “free to air” receivers being pretty easy to configure. My main pita was getting a cheap ftdi usb->serial adapter because that’s how old the underlying tech was. Still easier than jtagging an official receiver.

I migrated into it from the earlier days involving iso7816 card programming and mitm cards so I guess I didn’t have trouble finding which sites to get the fta files. I have good memories of those places being quite welcoming if you did your reading but sometimes ephemeral. Plenty of freeware (but sometimes delayed access). But part of the “payment model” was sevurity vendors trying to destroy their competitors or sell more countermeasures and card swaps to their satellite tv broadcast clients (!!!).

A card swap (and some prosecutions on the nudge nudge “free to air receiver” importers) put an end to most of it unless you went to internet-key-sharing systems where I guess the shared keys come from a handful of slave receivers somewhere. Given the 2-way nature of those key “subscriptions” and network connections required, I could (moreso) understand the paranoia of the operators.

Broadband penetration ultimately killed sat cracking, Netflix et al too. Oh, and what people usually call “iptv”.