The thing that irks me about this whole 'non-rooted devices only' debacle is that it seems to me that DSTV (and most people) don't really understand what a rooted device is.
Android is based on Linux, and in any Linux OS, the process of obtaining 'root' level rights is essentially the same as granting administrator rights on a Windows-based PC. This is not the same as 'jailbreaking' an iPhone. Getting root access simply allows the user access to some hidden and system folders, and thus more functions can be performed by the apps that they are running on the phone (access to phone hardware settings, etc.)
This is similar to having administrator rights on a PC and being able to edit things like your registry and accessing the system folders.
(That's why you need a rooted phone to run Titanium Backup - because without access to the system folders, you can't backup ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING - any Windows user who has tried to make a backup of their entire drive without admin rights would have encountered the same problem).
Now almost every PC user on the home market should have admin rights to their machines (it's only really in corporate environments that the admin accounts ever gets locked down), yet Drifta has supported PC users from the start - in fact they now have two Drifta devices that support PC! These will work on PC's where the user has admin rights...
But they won't let their precious little app run on a phone that has admin rights (rooted)?!
Everyone seems to think this is because of some risk that rooted phones pose to being able to steal their content. But if you wanted to record/stream DSTV content, you could do that quite easily on a PC using either the Drifta input, or for MUCH HIGHER QUALITY you could simply hook up the RCA output of a DSTV decoder to a TV capture card on your PC and record much better quality video than from a Drfita...
I even saw someone mention in a forum that rooted devices allowed you to take screenshots and DSTV didn't want to allow this: well, you can find plenty of ways to take screenshots from a non-rooted phone too (there are plent of apps in ther Market to do so).
So basically, why has DSTV been making such a big deal about rooted devices?
(I have a hunch: poor quality Android developers who don't understand the platform fully. Take the example of the WiFi connection disabling the 2G/3G data connection for instance = poor programming).
[/RANT OVER]