I have been reading things on this forum with great interest. Things do appear to be done differently in North America to what we have in Europe. Mostly we have several encryptions and a huge amount of providers, some who have secure cards other that don't.
IKS (Payserver) is frowned upon in Europe as most people in the hobby will share their local card with somebody else's local card in order to access another provider with no money exchanging hands. Payservers are probably the main reason why so many providers are now going black in Europe. I fully understand why IKS is used in North America, due to the limited amount of providers plus its not that easy to extract the required Boxkey and RSAkey in order to use the card outside the original providers receiver.
The hobby started within Europe with most people using linux based receivers using the gBox emu, support dried up with gBox and it was steadily replaced by CCCam and then by OSCam (Open Source). Most people in Europe still use either CCCam or OSCam.
The most widely used encryptions in place in Europe are NDS (CISCO) , Nagravision (Kudelski), Conax (Kudelski), Seca (Mediaguard) and Viaccess (Orange S.A).
There are other more obscure ones like Betacrypt, Bulcrypt, Cryptoworks, although most providers are now turning to NDS. Virtually every Satellite and Cable TV package in Europe, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe were wide open on cardshare, or just using Keys at some point in the last 5 years. There was a huge amount open on Keys, some providers like TPS - France bit the dust others changed encryption. We also still have a lot of stuff that is soft-encrypted using Control words (BISS Encryption)
NDS is probably the most successful one at stopping Cardshare at this moment in time. In the last few months we have lost all HD content on Sky UK and Sky Italia, were expecting Sky Germany to be next once they phase out all their Nagra and Betacrypt cards.
All users in Europe completely lost Dolce (Romania) and Total TV (Serbia) a few years ago due to a new card pairing algorithm . Both were fantastic packages.
OTE Greece and Viacom (Bulgaria) have never been available on CS for the same reason.
The most un secure encryptions in Europe would probably be Nagravision and Viaccess. When Nagra 3 came out Kudelski were stating that it couldn't be shared. It took the coders in Europe about 2 weeks before all Nagra 3 encrypted channels came back on through CS
Learning how things work on your side of the pond is definitely going to be interesting.
Nano