A News Corporation company recruited a pay-TV "pirate" to post hacked details of a rival's secret codes online, BBC Panorama has found.

Lee Gibling set up a website in the late 1990s known as The House of Ill-Compute or Thoic.

He said NDS, a pay-TV smartcard maker, then funded expansion of the Thoic site and later had him distribute the set-top pay-TV codes of rival ITV Digital.

NDS denied this and said Thoic was only used to gather intelligence on hackers.

It says Lee Gibling worked as a consultant who was used legitimately to inform on hackers.

ITV Digital was first launched as "On Digital" and was set up as a rival to News Corporation's Sky TV in 1998.

But the widespread availability of the secret codes meant ITV Digital's services could be accessed for free by pirates. The company went bust in 2002.
'Killer blow'

ITV Digital's former chief technical officer, Simon Dore, told the programme that piracy was "the killer blow for the business, there is no question".

"The business had its issues aside from the piracy... but those issues I believe would have been solvable by careful and good management. The real killer, the hole beneath the water line, was the piracy. We couldn't recover from that."

Lee Gibling told Panorama the codes on the Thoic site originated from NDS.

"They delivered the actual software to be able to do this, with prior instructions that it should go to the widest possible community," he said.