Satellite television

Satellite television is television delivered by way of communications satellites, as compared to conventional terrestrial television and cable television. In many areas of the world satellite television services supplement older terrestrial signals, providing a wider range of channels and services, including subscription-only services.

History

The first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstar satellite over North America in 1962. The first geosynchronous communication satellite, Syncom 2 was launched in 1963. The world's first commercial communication satellite, called Early Bird, was launched into synchronous orbit on April 6, 1965. The first national network of satellite television, called Orbita, was created in Soviet Union in 1967, and was based on the principle of using the highly-elliptical Molniya satellite for re-broadcasting and delivering of TV signal to ground downlink stations. The first domestic North American satellite to carry television was Canada’s geostationary Anik 1, which was launched in 1973. ATS-6, the world's first experimental educational and Direct Broadcast Satellite, was launched in 1974. The first Soviet geostationary satellite to carry Direct-To-Home television, called Ekran, was launched in 1976.

Consumer satellite television reception in the United States began in the early 1980's with the introduction of the first home satellite systems designed for receiving the same TVRO signals used for distribution to cable systems. Early setups were very expensive and large, with 12-foot dishes. Many were motorized, allowing for reception of multiple satellites, and therefore a greater selection of channels. Originally, all channels were available in the clear, including premium movie services, a major draw and source of growth for the then-burgeoning industry. In 1986, movie channel HBO encrypted their signal, setting a precedent for most other mainstream cable television services. This led to a major decline in the sales of satellite systems. By the early 1990's, the industry recovered as a result of Videocipher decoders being bundled with systems. TVRO systems reached their peak around 1995 before declining as a result of consumer adoption of higher-powered, "small-dish" systems such as Dish Network. As of May 31, 2005, 215,076 big dishes were still subscribed to pay TV programming, as opposed to nearly three million at the peak in 1995, although more may be in use solely for free-to-air television reception. ^*.

Technology

Satellites used for television signals are generally in either highly-elliptical (with inclination of +/-63.4 degrees and orbital period of about 12 hours) or geostationary orbit 37,000 km (22,300 miles) above the earth’s equator.

Satellite television, like other communications relayed by satellite, starts with a transmitting antenna located at an uplink facility. Uplink satellite dishes are very large, as much as 9 to 12 meters (30 to 40 feet) in diameter. The increased diameter results in more accurate aiming and increased signal strength at the satellite. The uplink dish is pointed toward a specific satellite and the uplinked signals are transmitted within a specific frequency range, so as to be received by one of the transponders tuned to that frequency range aboard that satellite. The transponder 'retransmits' the signals back to Earth but at a different frequency band (to avoid interference with the uplink signal), typically in the C-band and/or K_u-band. The leg of the signal path from the satellite to the receiving Earth station is called the downlink.

A typical satellite has up to 24 transponders for a C-band only satellite and up to 32 for K_u-band, or more for hybrid satellites. Typical transponders each have a bandwidth of about 36 to 50 Mbit/s. Each geo-stationary C-band satellite needs to be spaced 2 degrees from the next satellite (to avoid interference). For K_u the spacing can be 1 degree. This means that there is an upper limit of 360/2 = 180 geostationary C-band satellites and 360/1 = 360 geostationary K_u-band satellites. C-band transmission is susceptible to terrestrial interference while K_u-band transmission is affected by rain (as water is an excellent absorber of microwaves).

The downlinked satellite signal, quite weak after travelling the great distance (see inverse-square law), is collected by a parabolic receiving dish, which reflects the weak signal to the dish’s focal point. Mounted on brackets at the dish's focal point is a device called a feedhorn. This feedhorn is essentially the front-end of a waveguide that gathers the signals at or near the focal point and 'conducts' them to a low-noise block downconverter or LNB. The LNB converts the signals from electromagnetic or radio waves to electrical signals and shifts the signals from the downlinked C-band and/or K_u-band to the L-band range. Direct broadcast satellite dishes use an LNBF, which integrates the feedhorn with the LNB. (A new form of omnidirectional satellite antenna, which does not use a directed parabolic dish and can be used on a mobile platform such as a vehicle, was recently announced by the University of Waterloo. ^*)

The L band signal, now amplified, travels to a satellite receiver box, typically through coaxial cable (RG-6 or RG-10, etc.; cannot be standard RG-59). The satellite receiver then converts the signals to the desired form (outputs for television, audio, data, etc.). Sometimes, the receiver includes the capability to unscramble or decrypt; the receiver is then called an Integrated receiver/decoder or IRD.

Standards

Analog television distributed via satellite is usually sent scrambled or unscrambled in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM television broadcast standards.

If the signal is a digitized television signal or multiplex of signals, it is typically QPSK.

In general, digital television, including that transmitted via satellites, are generally based on open standards such as MPEG and DVB-S.

The encryption/scrambling methods include BISS, Conax, Digicipher, Irdeto, Nagravision, PowerVu, Viaccess, Videocipher, and VideoGuard. A large number of these schemes are known to be ineffective, however.

Categories of usage

There are three primary types of satellite television usage: reception direct by the viewer, reception by local television affiliates, or reception by headends for distribution across terrestrial cable systems.

Direct to the viewer reception includes direct broadcast satellite or DBS and television receive-only or TVRO, both used for homes and businesses including hotels, etc.

Direct broadcast via satellite

Direct broadcast satellite, (DBS) also known as "Direct-To-Home" is a relatively recent development in the world of television distribution. “Direct broadcast satellite” can either refer to the communications satellites themselves that deliver DBS service or the actual television service. DBS systems are commonly referred to as "mini-dish" systems. DBS uses the upper portion of the K_u band.

Modified DBS systems can also run on C-band satellites and have been used by some networks in the past to get around legislation by some countries against reception of K_u-band transmissions.

DBS systems are generally based on proprietary transport stream encoding and/or encryption requiring proprietary reception equipment. Service providers sometimes license several manufacturers to provide equipment capable of receiving the proprietary streams. This equipment typically uses a smart card as part of the decryption system or conditional access. This measure assures satellite television providers that only authorised, paying subscribers have access to Pay TV content but at the same time can allow free-to-air (FTA) channels to be viewed even by the people with standard equipment available in the market.

Television receive-only

Television receive-only, or TVRO, refers to satellite television reception equipment that is based primarily on open standards equipment. This contrasts sharply with direct broadcast satellite, which is a completely closed system that uses proprietary reception equipment. TVRO is often referred to as "big dish" satellite television.

TVRO systems are designed to receive analog and digital satellite feeds of both television or audio from both C-band and K_u-band transponders on FSS-type satellites. TVRO systems tend to use larger rather than smaller satellite dish antennas, since it is more likely that the owner of a TVRO system would have a C-band-only setup rather than a K_u band-only setup. Additional receiver boxes allow for different types of digital satellite signal reception, such as DVB/MPEG-2 and 4DTV.

The narrow beam width of a normal parabolic satellite antenna means it can only receive signals from a single satellite at a time. Simulsat is a quasi-parabolic satellite earthstation antenna that is capable of receiving satellite transmissions from 35 or more C- and K_u-band satellites simultaneously.

Direct broadcasting satellites which can be received by what are known in Chinese as little ears have had a major role in breaking the government monopoly of information on Mainland China. Although met with frequent and generally unsuccessful efforts to regulate them, these small satellite dishes are fairly common in urban China. Satellite television has also played an important role in broadcasting to expatriate communities such as Arabs, and overseas Chinese.

Satellite television by continent and country

Africa

South African-based Multichoice's DStv is the main digital satellite television provider in sub-Saharan Africa, broadcasting principally in English, but also in Portuguese, German and Afrikaans. Canal Horizons, owned by France's Canal Plus, is the main provider in French-speaking Africa. Satellite television has been far more successful in Africa than cable, primarily because the infrastructure for cable television does not exist and would be expensive to install since majority of Africans cannot afford paid cable television. Furthermore, maintaining a cable network is expensive due to the need to cover larger and more sparesly populated areas though there are some terrestrial pay-TV and MMDS services.

The Americas

Canada

In Canada, the two legal DBS services available are Bell Canada’s ExpressVu and StarChoice. The CRTC has refused to license American satellite services, but nonetheless hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Canadians access or have accessed American services — usually these services have to be billed to an American address and are paid for in U.S. dollars. Whether such activity is grey market or black market is the source of often heated debate between those who would like greater choice and those who argue that the protection of Canadian firms and Canadian culture is more important.

Most recently as of 2004, an October 2004 ruling by judge Danièle Côté of Québec has determined Canada's Radiocommunication Act to be in direct violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; the judgement gave the federal government a one-year deadline to remedy this breach of the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land. However this goes contrary to prior Supreme Court of Canada decisions and will likely be appealed.

In addition, Canadian satellite providers continue to be plagued by the unquestionably black market devices which "pirate" or "steal" their signals as well as by a number of otherwise completely lawful devices which can be reprogrammed to receive pirate TV.

One cable TV CEO (Karl Péladeau of Québecor, which owns Vidéotron) is on public record as demanding conditions be placed on the CRTC license issued to Bell ExpressVu, due to BEV’s reputation for vastly inferior security compared to its cable rivals and Shaw Cable–owned StarChoice.

Although there are no official statistics, the use of American satellite services in Canada appears to be declining as of 2004.

Some would claim that this is probably due to a combination of increasingly aggressive police enforcement and an unfavourable exchange rate between the Canadian and U.S. currencies. As the U.S. dollar has been declining as of 2005 versus other international currencies, the decline in DirecTV viewership in Canada may well be related not to a cost difference as much as to the series of smart card swaps which have rendered the first three generations of DirecTV access cards (F, H and HU) all obsolete.

Latin America

Latin America’s main satellite system are SKY Television, which has up to one million subscribers in Brazil and Mexico and DirecTV Latin America, which provides service to the rest of the Americas. Pay-TV is not popular among Latin American TV viewers and fees are expensive in PPP terms.

United States

Consumer satellite television reception began in the United States in the early 1980s with the introduction of the first home satellite systems designed for receiving the same TVRO signals used for distribution to cable systems. Early setups were very expensive and large, with 12-foot (3.7 m) dishes common. Many were motorized, allowing for reception from multiple satellites, and therefore a greater selection of channels. Originally, all channels were available in the clear, including premium movie services, a major draw and source of growth for the then-burgeoning industry. In 1986, movie channel HBO encrypted their signal, setting a precedent for most other mainstream cable television services. This led to a major decline in the sales of satellite systems. By the early 1990s, the industry recovered as a result of Videocipher decoders being bundled with systems. TVRO systems reached their peak around 1995 before declining as a result of consumer adoption of higher-powered, "small-dish" systems such as DirecTV, Primestar, and the Dish Network. As of May 31, 2005, 215,076 big dishes were still subscribed to pay TV programming 1, as opposed to nearly three million at the peak in 1995, although more may be in use solely for free-to-air television reception.

Hughes’s DirecTV, the first high-powered DBS system, went online in 1994 and was the first North American DBS service; it is now owned by News Corporation. In 1996, EchoStar’s Dish Network went online in the United States and has gone on to similar success as DirecTV’s primary competitor. Dominion Video Satellite Inc.'s Sky Angel also went online in the United States in 1996 with its DBS service geared toward the faith and family market. It has since grown from six to 36 TV and radio channels of family entertainment, Christian-inspirational programming and 24-hour news. Dominion, under its former corporate name Video Satellite Systems Inc., was actually the second from among the first nine companies to apply to the FCC for a high-power DBS license in 1981 and is the sole surviving DBS pioneer from that first round of forward-thinking applicants. In 2004, Cablevision’s Voom service went online, specifically catering to the emerging market of HDTV owners and aficionados, but folded in April 2005, with the service’s “exclusive” high-definition channels currently being migrated to the Dish Network system. Commercial DBS services are the primary competition to cable television service, although the two types of service have significantly different regulatory requirements (for example, cable television has public access requirements, and the two types of distribution have different regulations regarding carriage of local stations). The majority of ethnic-language broadcasts to North America are carried on K_u band free-to-air; the largest concentration of ethnic programming is on Intelsat Americas 5 at 97° W. GlobeCast World TV offers a mix of free and pay-TV ethnic channels in the internationally-standard DVB-S format, as do others. Home2US Communications Inc. also offers ethnic programming, the platform is on AMC-4 at 101° W, with several ethnic channels as well as free and pay-TV. Several U.S.-English language network affiliates (representing CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, Fox, WB, i and UPN) are available as free-to-air broadcasts, as are the three U.S.-Spanish language networks (Univisión, Telefutura and Telemundo). The number of free-to-air specialty channels is otherwise rather limited. Specific FTA offerings tend to appear and disappear rather often and typically with little or no notice, although sites such as LyngSat do track the changing availability of both free and pay channels worldwide.

Asia

Malaysia

Malaysia's sole satellite television operator, Measat Broadcast Network Systems (a subsidiary of Astro All Asia Networks plc) launched Astro in 1996. It currently holds exclusive rights from the Malaysian government to offer satellite television broadcasting services in the country through the year 2017.

Japan

NHK started experimental broadcasting TV programm using BS-2a satellite on May, 1984. After these successful experiments, NHK started regular service (NTSC) and experimental HDTV broadcasting using BS-2b on June, 1989. On April, 1991, Japanese company JSB started pay TV service while BS-3 communication satellite was in use. In 1996 total number of households that receive satellite broadcasting exceeded 10 million.

The modern two satellite systems in use in Japan are B-SAT and JSAT; the BS digital service uses B-SAT, while SKY PerfecTV! uses JSAT.

Middle East & North Africa

The Middle East has a high penetration of homes receiving TV channels via DTH satellite. One of the pioneers of free-to-air digital satellite television is considered to be MBC, which began broadcasting in c band through Arabsat and is the first network in the world to offer a free-to-air Western based English language movie channel to the Middle East audience via its spinoff channel MBC 2. Its direct rival is considered to be Dubai, UAE based One TV, earlier called Channel 33, which was the first channel in the Middle East to provide English language general entertainment programming for the expatriate community.

The first digital DTH pay-TV network to provide Western Entertainment was Orbit Satellite Television and Radio Network broadcasting via Arabsat (C band), later on Showtime Arabia a joint venture between Viacom (21% stake) and KIPCO (79% stake) started broadcasting, via PanAmSat (C band), but later switched over to Nilesat (KU band). Arab Radio & Television (ART) now known as Arab Digital Distribution although a late comer, gained ground by broadcasting exclusive sports events.

These networks can be easily received via 60cm to 180cm satellite dishes. Most of the popular channels are transmitting from these satellites and orbital positions: Arabsat at 26°E, Asiasat at 100.5°E and 105.5°E, Eutelsat Hot Bird at 13°E, Nilesat at 7°W, and PanAmSat at 68.5°E.

Lyngsat satellite charts prove, the Middle East enjoys the highest number of FTA digital satellite channels in the world, with One TV and MBC 2 airing blockbuster movies like The Lord of the Rings film trilogy without any encryption.

Australasia

Satellite television in Australia has proven to be a far more feasible option than cable television, due to the vast distances between population centres. The first service to come online in Australia was Galaxy Television, which was later taken over by Cable Television giant Foxtel, which now operates both cable and satellite services to all state capital cities and the Southwest. Its main metropolitan rival was Optus Television, while rural areas of the Eastern States are served by Austar, who as of 2005 just rebroadcast Foxtel.

In New Zealand, SKY Network Television offers multichannel digital satellite TV, in addition to its terrestrial UHF service. The upcoming FreeView service will also be available on satellite.

Europe

Continental Western Europe

In Europe, DBS satellite services are found mainly on Astra satellites and Hotbird (operated by Eutelsat), with Sky Italia, Canal Digitaal and UPC being the main providers in Italy, Western Europe and Central Europe. BSkyB (known as Sky) also serves Northern Europe and many channels can be received as far away as Cyprus.

The overall market share of DBS satellite services in 2004 was 21.4% of all TV homes, however this highly varies from country to country. For example, in Germany, with many free-to-air TV-stations, DBS market share is almost 40%, and in Belgium and the Netherlands, it’s only about 7%, due to the widespread cable networks with exclusive content.

Russia

Since creation of its national network of satellite television in 1967, Russian satellite broadcasting service based on powerful geostationary buses which provide mostly free-to-air television channels to millions of householders. Pay-TV is not popular among Russian TV viewers and only the NTV Russia news company has a few encrypted channels.

United Kingdom

The first commercial DBS service in the United Kingdom, Sky Television, was launched in 1989, providing 4 analogue TV channels. In the following year BSB was launched, broadcasting five channels in D-MAC format; the two services subsequently merged to form British Sky Broadcasting. In 1994 17% of the group was floated on the London Stock Exchange (with ADRs listed on the New York Stock Exchange), and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns a 35% stake.

By 1999, following the launch of several more satellites (at 19.2°E by SES Astra, the number of channels had increased to around 60 and BSkyB launched the first subscription-based digital television platform in the UK, offering a range of 200 channels broadcast from the Astra satellites at 28.2°E under the brand name Sky Digital. BSkyB’s analogue service has now been discontinued, with all customers having been migrated to Sky Digital.

Nordic countries

The first satellite service specifically set to the Nordic region was TV3 which launched in 1987. With the launch of Astra 1A, getting the TV3 channel got easier. The first Nordic-specific satellite, Tele-X, was launched in 1989. The services directed at Scandinavia were then scattered among several satellites. In 1993, the former BSB satellites were bought by a Swedish and a Norwegian company, respectively. These two satellites were renamed Thor 1 and Sirius 1, moved to new positions and started broadcasting services intended for people in the Nordic region. With the launch of additional Thor and Sirius satellites later in the 1990s, Astra and other satellites were abandoned by the Nordic services with almost all Nordic satellite television migrating to the Sirius and Thor satellites.

Initially the basic channels were free-to-air. This caused several rights problems since viewers throughout Europe were able to see very much acquired English language programming as well as sports for free on the Nordic channels, although the channels only held broadcasting rights for specific countries. One way of avoiding that was to switch from PAL to the D2MAC standard, hardly used anywhere outside the Nordic region. An unencrypted channel could still be seen in all the Nordic satellite homes, so eventually all channels went encrypted (several of them only being available in one country).

There are two competing satellite services: Canal Digital (Norwegian Telenor) and Viasat (Kinnevik). Canal Digital launched in 1997 and was digital from the start, broadcasting from Thor. Kinnevik had been operating an analogue subscription service since the late 1980s, but waited until the year 2000 before launching a digital service. All analogue services from Thor and Sirius will have ceased in 2006, when the three remaining Danish channels go digital-only. The competition between Viasat and Canal Digital has caused some homes in Scandinavia to have to buy two set-top boxes and have two subscriptions to get the full range of channels. Viasat doesn't provide their own channels (TV3, TV3+, ZTV, TV1000 and the Viasat-branded channels) on the Canal Digital platform. Canal Digital does however have exclusive distribution of channels from SBS Broadcasting, Discovery, TV2 Denmark and Eurosport; for several years the Swedish SVT and TV4 channels were also exclusive to Canal Digital.

External links

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