The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

Presumably there's some sort of fee from the box manufacturer to
'freesat' for use of the name and access to technical standards for
the EPG?

I don't see why there should be.
Certainly when I stuck a PC card in my PC and hooked it up to a dish,
there was no charge for downloading the EPG.

Ah, but you've not got a nice flowery freesat logo, have you?

And the free software certainly understood its format.

The EPG (unlike the now/next) is encrypted, but that was cracked.

Why would they charge for it?

Because it does take /some/ effort to develop the freesat EPG, to
support STV manufacturers, or in the case of freeview, the spec for the
"play" rewind feature, etc.