Funny thing is the legit set top boxes were never known for reliability either in the beginning. Amstrad ( I know, not exactly the best ever, but a British company that made the junk on shore in most cases), Sky and all the other set top boxes were not too reliable at all, with them generally failing after a year or so of purchase ( generally just out of warranty) and with the repairs being a simple case of replace a bag of capacitors, or in some of them the bag of capacitors and a few other parts. There were whole cottage industries that sprang up to do these repairs, and many also dabbled in the other kind of upgrades, that involved changes to access methods.
In the extreme case a sky box that would be free to use, and would ignore all upgrades and disconnect methods, and which did not need a smart card either, all the work being done by reprogramming the existing firmware on the on board processor ( mostly to get rid of poor original coding to get the space needed) to have the smart card functions on there as well.
Here the stock faults on the decoders were a few poorly specced capacitors, that would die with time, leading to poor decoding in the beginning ( long channel lock up times, and audio dropouts) and then lead to hum on vision after a while, then to a hum bar across the video and audio hum, along with no pass through. Change the 2 capacitors and all was well again, but most users would have gone and paid for a service exchange decoder instead. Then there was the 40 pin PIC micro in a small pcb with a long DIP socket, used to emulate a good data stream to the main decoder chip, plugged into the board with the chip plugged into a socket next to it.
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