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Comment by pnako | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, aside maybe from some technical limitations, the reason it was not "proper" encryption where you can't make any sense of the signal is that it gave some idea of what was playing. The sound was completely scrambled but from the picture you could tell the program and tell if it was a football game, movie, talk show, etc.

I had that channel for a while and watching WWE with French commentary was a favorite when I was a kid :)

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The "make sense of what could be" might have been a good way to make people tempted to subscribe actually: it was so frustrating to identify a program you could be interested in and not be able to fully see it.

Yeah, a weird kind of freemium model. I am assuming it wouldn't be hard to turn off the encryption for say an hour every once in a while and advertise a 'free viewing' every once in a while to get people to subscribe.

That's exactly what they did and where they got most of their customers from.

Those 'free viewing' (canal+ en clair) probably had one of the biggest impact on french comedy TV culture ever. Some shows of that era are still on AFAIK.

For the football games, they turned on the encryption shortly after the game started. This created the expression "but en clair" ("unencrypted goal") where a team would score so early that the encryption was still off.

> biggest impact on french comedy TV culture ever.

And french politics. French politics in the '90s and '00s wouldn't be the same without Les Guignols de l'Info.

We had Les Guinols in Spain too, in the same channel.

There were broadcasters doing that too, such as Cine 5 in Turkey, disabling scrambling for commercial breaks.

That's why at the end of the 2010's, C+ decided to reintroduce this "encryption" scheme because people changing channels would end up on a black or blank screen saying "subscribe". That wasn't really appealing to a potential customer.

Now if you tune to channel 4, you get the blurred image again...

> I had that channel for a while and watching WWE with French commentary was a favorite when I was a kid :)

Tu veux dire le p•rn• du premier samedi du mois ;)

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