My guess is they will authoriza the card for one year, then if you don't pay them it will become invalid. You need the authorization, not just the card. And as far as I know the card number and the decoder number has to be married. A lot of subscription based services in this country use the same trick, such as dish. You need to call the dish center to authorize your card. Glad to hear you parents are coming ! If they only are interested in watching
CCTV4, then you don't have other choices, you have to spend that $260 to get the phoenix decoder. Otherwise, there are some free-to-air stations on
Telstar 5, such as taiwan's MacTV, and falung gong's NDTV, and some buddhism's TVs.