Thread  RSS Captain Midnight HBO Takeover



# 8569 8 years ago on Tue, Jan 5 2016 at 5:12 pm
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Did you ever hear about the satellite TV takeover on HBO back in the 80's?

One day after the (obviously completely unrelated) Chernobyl disaster, John MacDougall was angry with HBO for having ridiculous prices, which was hurting his satellite TV business.

He used his equipment, which he had earlier been using for a legit business-related purpose, to take over the signal and put the following on the screen about a half hour after midnight (hence the name, I guess) for about five minutes:

GOODEVENING HBO
    FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
        $12.95/MONTH  ?
           NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

laughing he did this during a showing of "The Falcon and Snowman", some historically based spy movie, and p***ed a bunch of viewers off.

HBO actually had to give up trying to override his pirate signal because he used so much transmitter power. HBO didn't want to risk burning up their own equipment so they let it ride for the 5 minutes.

(This post was edited 8 years ago on Tuesday, January 5th, 2016 at 5:37 pm)

difference with regards to MISS that have a lot of d

# 8574 8 years ago on Tue, Jan 5 2016 at 5:16 pm

MacDougall was caught and charged for the pirated intrusion. He didn't serve any time and just had to pay a heavy fine.

Don't try this stuff at home, kids.

73's, KD8FUD

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# 9043 8 years ago on Sun, Jan 10 2016 at 7:28 pm

That's crazy. I had no idea it was that easy to take over satellite TV!

Where is my head

# 9951 8 years ago on Tue, Jan 12 2016 at 12:30 am

Nowadays if there was a TV hijacking it would probably have been planned on 4chan and have something to do with a fake zombie apocalypse.

It doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full. There's clearly enough room for more wine.


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