While thinking about this for a bit after reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419930, I thought of someth

While thinking about this for a bit after reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419930, I thought of something: Why not just get the home package and run it through your own overlay system? The fatal flaw here with this design is that there's nothing in place of the glass. With enough tinkering (a pub subscription and a home subscription to play with, and maybe a fortnight to a month, if that) build something that exactly reproduces the watermark. 1080i-capable HDMI capture systems are expensive but not 5-figures (or even 4-figures) expensive nowadays, and most satellite feeds don't even justify 1080i anyway. Do satellite receivers do HDCP? If they do, RGB video is still very very very good quality for 1080i, and reference-quality RGB capture systems aren't 5 figures (probably very low 4 figures). You could just output via HDMI or whatever of course. To complete the setup, you could have one place receive a legitimate broadcast, and (alongside the TVs/projectors) run that through a capture system which would do differential frame analysis to heuristically figure out what watermark is displaying at the moment. This location automatically pushes the current watermark type out to a bunch of other places - for a nice small fee. Of course, the above is said from an honest academic-security standpoint. :P