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>$8 a month per subscriber seems pretty low for the hardware and bandwidth involved per stream.

USB DVB-T dongle is $7 with free shipping. So they simply CANT spend more on hardware when it is that cheap with cots parts.

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Thats less than half of the equation. They still have to get the signal to a transcoder, transcode the stream, store it on a "personal DVR" for each customer, and then stream it to you.

You will be transcoding hundreds of SAME streams. If they are at least a little bit smart they implemented shared intermediate data pool = you transcode them individually, but you reuse all the calculations = only one set of calculations per one Multiplex, rest pooled from cached data.

Areo offers service to people in radio shadows.

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