Satellite TV Concepts

Early satellite TV viewers were developed with a lot of trial and errors. They used their expensive dishes to discover unique programming that wasn't necessarily intended for mass usage. The dish and receiving equipment gave viewers the tools to pick up foreign stations, live feeds between international broadcast stations. Some satellite owners still seek out this sort of customizing on their own, but most satellite TV customers get their programming through a direct broadcast satellite provider like Dish Network or DirecTV. The provider selects programs and broadcasts them to subscribers as a set package. Basically, the provider's goal is to bring dozens or even hundreds of channels to your television and some of them in high definition form. Nowadays, the provider's broadcast is completely digital, which means it has much better picture and sound quality compared to the early versions.

The viewer's dish picks up the signal from the satellite or from multiple satellites in the same part of the sky which then passes it on to the receiver dish of a subscriber. Satellite TV providers receives their feeds from two major sources: national turnaround channels and various local channels in the area. Most of the turnaround channels also provide programming for cable television, and the local channels typically broadcast their programming over the airwaves. Turnaround channels usually have a distribution center that beams their programming to a geostationary satellite. The broadcast center uses large satellite dishes to pick up these analog and digital signals from several sources.

The broadcast center converts all channel and TV programs into a high-quality, uncompressed digital stream. At this point, the stream contains a vast quantity of data that ranges to 300 megabits per second for each channel. To transmit the signal from there, the broadcast center has to compress it. Otherwise, it would be too big for the satellite to handle. Most local stations don't transmit their programming to satellites, so the provider has to get it another way. If the provider includes local programming in a particular area, it will have a small local facility consisting of a few racks of communications equipment. The equipment receives local signals directly from the broadcaster through fiber-optic cable or an antenna and then transmits them to the central broadcast center.