John R. MacDougall, the signal intruder responsible on Wikimedia

We all know that subscription packages are a lot nowadays. What started as a cool, ad-free platform soon became worse than cable TV, and now we’re right back where we started: paying out the wazoo for streaming services—and they aren’t even ad-free anymore. 

As it turns out, customers have griped about unfair prices for decades, and one man took it so far that he was charged thousands of dollars and slapped with probation for his stand. This is the story of John R. MacDougall, the man who hacked HBO. 

The People vs. Television

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This whole thing started back in the ‘80s. While cable today still airs minutes of ads, and streaming services charge more to get rid of them, yesterday’s satellite owners had a different problem: companies intentionally scrambling their channels. Long story short: media companies started charging satellite owners to descramble signals that cable operators also had. 

What did this mean for dish-havers? It meant they were left in the dust, forced to pay egregious fees to access descrambled channels, or charged way more than the average cable viewer. As if that wasn’t bad enough, popular stations exacerbated the outrage with their own schemes. 

Enter HBO—the provider we already pay too much for. Sadly, they weren’t any better back in the ‘80s. They slammed satellite owners with $12.95 monthly fees (nearly $40 US by today’s standards), and charged upwards of $400 for a “descrambler” that would allow customers to keep watching HBO. Suffice it to say, people weren’t happy. 

Criminal or Unsung Hero?

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John MacDougall ran his own satellite dealership, MacDougall Electronics, which rapidly lost business amid the scrambled satellite wars. To try and stop the bleeding, he wrote letters to legislators demanding they end unfair price hikes, but those didn’t go very far. As his business dwindled, he had to pick up work as an operations engineer at Central Florida Teleport just to make ends meet.

Turns out, those technical skills would soon be put to good use. In the wee hours of the morning, MacDougall actually test-drove a signal intrusion. He started small: a color block test on HBO’s network. It worked, and it wasn’t even investigated; it happened too early in the morning and was too small an interruption, so people barely saw it. But it let MacDougall know that he could probably do it again, this time, airing a very special message. 

In April 1986, he clocked out of his dealership and headed to his second job. MacDougall aimed a massive 30-foot transmission dish back at Galaxy 1, the satellite that carried HBO. When he had people’s attention, he only aired one message over color bars: “GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH  ? NO WAY ![SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]”

The Aftermath

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It might seem like a harmless intrusion, but HBO didn’t take kindly to the interruption. Executives thought it was a terrorist attack, and the fact that MacDougall maintained 90 seconds of airtime didn’t help the panic. (Funnily enough, it didn’t take long for guilt to set in, and MacDougall admitted he couldn’t sleep well when we went home that night.)

An investigation quickly started, one that involved both the FBI and the FCC. Media picked up the story, too. Sure enough, the Department of Justice narrowed down a few suspects, one of whom was MacDougall himself. It was all a little too much to handle, and with his own conscience already eating away at him, he turned himself in. 

Folks were quick to brand MacDougall as a man of the people—but the law didn’t see it that way. He initially faced a $100,000 fine and one year in prison, but a plea deal got his fine cut in half and earned him a year of unsupervised probation instead. To make matters worse, HBO wasn’t exactly rattled by the debacle, and they didn’t even lower their prices.

Some people still regard MacDougall as a brave man who spoke out against petty injustices. Others see him as just another man who overstayed his 15 minutes of fame. However you see him, it’s hard to ignore the impact one man’s actions had on ‘80s lore, even if it was all for naught in the end.