If you’re a bar owner, you probably have a whole rack of satellite TV receivers. After all, everyone knows that showing sports in your bar is a great way to keep customers in their seats. You probably also have a receiver in your office, just for you. Imagine you come in one day, and find that one of the receivers in the rack is broken. It happens. Can you just take the one from your office and put it in there?
Yeah, but
They probably won’t catch you at first but… this is one of the worst things you can do in DIRECTV’s opinion, short of committing out-and-out fraud. It’s essentially like bringing in a receiver from home. They take this very seriously and if you are caught you should expect to hear some harsh words coming from your DIRECTV people.
Why is this such a problem? It all has to do with the idea of “public viewing.” If you put a receiver in your bar you are showing the programming to the general public the pricing structure is very different.
Here’s the real issue
When you put in a receiver in a public area, it’s priced according to the fire code occupancy of the area. This is done so that royalties can be collected and sent back to the companies that make the programs. It’s all part of complex legal agreements put in place between DIRECTV and those content providers. If DIRECTV doesn’t honor those agreements then they can be fined a lot of money, so they make sure that the individual customers are doing their part.
It’s also true that if you have a DIRECTV system in your hotel, you can’t take one of the receivers from a room and put it in the hotel bar.
Will they really find you? Yes they will
How will they find you? First of all, it’s said that there’s a bounty given to DIRECTV employees who report fraud that they find. I don’t think it’s open to all DIRECTV employees but there’s enough evidence that a large group of the millions of employees out there do have some sort of incentive to turn you in. But how would they know? In some cases it’s because of the programming. Certain programming isn’t allowed in public viewing spaces, mostly premium channels. Most often, it’s the DVR service. DVRs are simply not allowed in bars and other public places. If you see that “pause” or progress bar in a restaurant, you know it’s not supposed to be there.
Another thing people do is connect a receiver to the internet, so they can get extra features. Connecting a receiver to the internet sends its location data to DIRECTV’s headquarters and if that receiver isn’t where it is supposed to be, or if there are two receivers on the same account but at two different locations, it raises a red flag automatically.
People actually look for this problem for a living
And although they are shrouded in secrecy, there is a “Fraud Squad” full of people who literally go all over the place for the express purpose of following up with possibilities of fraud. I have to imagine that there is some sort of algorithm that looks over aerial photography with the goal of finding satellite dishes where they shouldn’t be. If they find you — you’re in trouble. I actually know someone who ran afoul of them and in order to avoid prosecution he had to pay the difference between the residential and commercial rates, plus a fee, and he had to lock in commercial service for another two years. Sounds like a sweetheart deal, when you realize the prison time absolutely was on the table.
The bottom line here is that putting DIRECTV service in the bar is more expensive, that’s true, but it’s more expensive for a reason and if you try to avoid that there can be some serious problems.
Want to know more? Ask the experts!
The team at Signal Connect knows all about DIRECTV for business. We’re a DIRECTV National Accounts dealer and we were awarded DIRECTV’s Commercial Dealer of the Year. We know how to take care of your needs. Don’t just settle for an overseas call center or a local installer who might not know the whole story. We have people on staff who design and support business satellite systems all day. We’ll help you with account management, tech support, and anything else you need. Give us a call and learn about real customer service. Our team is here to support you! Call 888-233-7563 during East Coast business hours. If it’s after hours, try anyway! We have people in the office all the time. If you don’t get an answer, fill out the form below. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
