CS Link

» see cslink.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Through the 2000s the cheapest television in Turkey was a dish bolted to a balcony rail and a free-to-air receiver under the set, so the Czech satellite market is one of the few European stories here that reads as familiar rather than foreign. The difference is the card. CS Link charged a one-off fee for a decoder card and activated it for nothing, and the roughly twenty Czech and Slovak channels behind that card then cost nothing per month.

The platform launched in 2006, continuing a service that had already traded under the names Gital and Czech Link. Its operator was a company called Media Vision. You could describe the whole product in a breath, which in satellite television is unusual: you bought the card and pointed the dish, and you paid extra only if you wanted one of the premium packages on top of the national channels.

It worked well enough to reach over 400,000 customers in the Czech Republic by February 2011, with Slovakia on top of that. Two years later the Czech press put the combined figure at around 600,000 households, against roughly 1.5 million for its larger rival Skylink. Those two numbers are only loosely comparable, since one counts customers and the other counts households, but the order of magnitude is right: this was a mass-market platform, in a Czech market of roughly ten million.

Then both platforms ended up belonging to the same Luxembourg company, and one of them was surplus.

~ the case file ~

~ one card, paid once ~

A platform with no monthly revenue has to find money somewhere, and in May 2012 CS Link found it. On 30 May the operator announced that from 1 September there would be a service fee of 29 crowns a month, or 348 a year, on the cards that had been sold as a one-time purchase. The Czech technology site Lupa afterwards described the offer as free in quotation marks.

That detail dates the whole thing. CS Link was built in the window when a satellite platform could be a card and a dish rather than a subscription, and it was already charging rent on the card four years before it closed.

~ the channels went first ~

The shutdown ran in stages across four years, and almost every stage has a date. The pay-television packages were withdrawn from sale on 24 September 2012. Six paid channels were switched off on 30 November 2012. The remaining channels stayed live on CS Link cards until 15 January 2013, when those went too. Registration of new cards ended on 31 March 2013, after which anyone who wanted the service had to buy a card from Skylink instead.

What was left was a card-swap program. CS Link's CryptoWorks and Irdeto cards were exchanged for Skylink Irdeto cards through the end of 2016, and the platform formally stopped existing on 30 September 2016, when the Irdeto system it ran on, CAID 0666, was turned off.

~ the holding company ~

The buyer was M7 Group, the Luxembourg operator behind Canal Digitaal, and it moved fast in 2011. In February the Czech broadcasting council registered the transfer of the whole of Media Vision to M7, and later that year M7 also acquired Skylink, so the two competing Czech satellite platforms were under one roof within months of each other.

Lupa called what followed a managed liquidation of CS Link, or, more gently, a merger of two formerly competing platforms into one. Both descriptions are accurate. M7 itself was bought by Canal+ in 2019, which is how a Czech decoder card from 2006 ends up redirecting to a French broadcaster's offer page today.

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