There is an abundance of speculation in the FTA Forum and FTA industry whether or not that the Viewsat V-LINK will save Viewsat.

Viewsat has lost a lengthy and arduous court battle and many of its north American distributors and programmers whom made the FTA FILES are either in jail currently and have had millions of fines against them.

As Viewsat legal troubles slowly reared their ugly head towards their company, companies like Sonicview, KBOX, ILINK, CNX, and others have provided their customers with IKS Dongles to access FTA and allow their recover to have an internet connection.

Viewsat missed the boat on this device, for about a year, while their competitors flooded the market with new dongles and new FTA Receivers to compete.

The FTA Receiver market used to be dominated by Viewsat, for three years they were the popular brand most new people to FTA first got. It had an easy setup procedure and was quickly understood how you could maintain this box over the long term.

Once Nagra 3 occurred, and stand alone files became useless some machines never lost their strides due to their existing online infrastructure, such as Nfusion. Many companies rushed out devices to gain a huge market share. Many of the dominant companies during the Nagra 2 iteration such as Coolsat, Captiveworks, Viewsat and others never released a dongle and have seen lacklustre sales over the last year.
Companies such as CNX, Sonicview and ILINK increased the number of units purchased and with internet dongles became the dominant players in the Nagra 3 iteration.

The Viewsat V-LINK arrives close to eight months after Nagra 3, and most people have already given up their old receivers and bought new ones. Some loyal Viewsat owners have been patiently waiting for a new fix to arrive, and it has! You do have to buy a Viewsat V-LINK dongle though.
The Dongle costs around $110.00 and plugs in the back of your receiver, there is support only for the Ultra and Ultra-Lite right now, with support coming in the near future for both HD devices. There is no word on support for older models such as the Extreme, PRO, 7000, Platinum and others.

With the cost of the dongle equalling a new receiver, our advice is to upgrade to a more current machine that has been stable for the last six months. Companies such as CNX and ILINK have their infrastructure working very well, and have all of the quirks worked out. You can expect with a new system with the V-LINK that there will be months of growing pains, freezing, and days of outage as the new servers accommodate heavier loads of traffic.

Stay tuned to our FTA BLOG for further developments

It is our thought that Viewsat missed the boat not releasing IKS files or a solution faster, and has downgraded their status and visibility in the market place. If they can weather the storm of legal troubles and everything else and come out on top, still remains to be seen.

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