That's a good point. And, it's easy to get access to the dishes with a drone. They're either on top of the station or merely behind a fence (we had both). You would need some insider information, though, or to spend a lot of time observing and experimenting. Most stations have multiple dishes and at any given time the station may be playing recordings from tape rather than showing satellite feeds directly. At the station I worked at, we rolled morning kids shows, prime time network shows, Rockets games, and later some news segments, from satellite directly. Everything else, about 85% of our programming, came from tape. That's probably evolved since then.
I wonder how much of satellite transmissions have gone digital (and thus, likely to be something you could only jam and not replace) in the ~20 years since I was working in the industry. It wasn't even really on the radar when I left the business; even stuff that had a major digital component, like automated advertising feeds, were still being transmitted analog for the video and just the metadata was digital and sent via another mechanism (internet, I think).
I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those signals too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too old" to be doing anything except analog - although I do sometimes notice the resolution on MotoGP races drop significantly, I think that's last mile cable bandwidth problems when the Sunday night movie starts pumping full HD into all my neighbours houses, rather than the signal from space...
> I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those signals too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too old" to be doing anything except analog
Most satilites operate as a really dumb "bent pipe".
You transmit a signal on one frequency, and it amplifies and re-transmits that signal exact same signal on another frequency.
There is no decoding and re-encoding of the signal. The satilites is completely agnostic to the formatting, and encoding of the signal. All you need to do is replace the equipment at each ground station and you can transmit encrypted digital.
On the flipside, I don't think satilites do any authentication of the signal they are retransmitting. If someone transmits a stronger signal, the satilites will lock onto that and retransmit that instead.
However, the receiving equipment probably does authenticate and won't accept the hijacked signal, so all you get is a jamming effect. But the satilite itself is hijackable.
I don't know too much about the tech, but live sport has been encrypted for several years now.
Here's an anecdote about one sport in particular - UK horse racing. There's a pay TV channel (Racing UK) that broadcasts races live. They would bring their broadcasting equipment to each track, and upload the live raw video over a satellite link. This stream was then downloaded at their head office, where it was mixed and graphics were added, before it was re-uploaded to (another? the same?) satellite as the 'official' TV channel.
With the right equipment, you could view the raw video feeds yourself, rather than watch the re-transmitted official channel. This gave just over a second or so of improved latency, which, for some serious in-running gamblers, was a crucial advantage. But about five years ago, Racing UK started encrypting their live feeds. Nowadays, only a few people with insider information can obtain the 'faster' video...
I wonder how much of satellite transmissions have gone digital (and thus, likely to be something you could only jam and not replace) in the ~20 years since I was working in the industry. It wasn't even really on the radar when I left the business; even stuff that had a major digital component, like automated advertising feeds, were still being transmitted analog for the video and just the metadata was digital and sent via another mechanism (internet, I think).