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DirecTV Plans 1500 HiDef Channels by End of 2007

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the infomercials-and-bad-movies dept.

doormat writes "DirecTV plans on launching four Ka-band satellites by 2007. This means local HiDef channels over satellite for the biggest markets by the end of 2005, with room for 500 HD channels. Plus 1000 more HD local channels and 150 national HD channels by the end of 2007. Thats a total bandwidth of 34Gbit/s, which is about 10 times the bandwidth they currently have in the Ku band (the band they use now for direct-to-home TV service). The bandwidth crunch for satellite providers is over, and the Ka band is the answer."

10 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rain Fade by the_denman · · Score: 3, Interesting
    my understanding is that they will do it in the same way that they get away with using the little dishes, pumping a huge amount of power out.

    DIRECTV 10 and DIRECTV 11, to be built by Boeing, will be among the largest and most powerful Ka-band satellites ever launched.

  2. Re:Rain Fade by Cramer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    C band hardware doesn't have a problem with rain fade because the dish is over a meter wide. If you aimed a 1.8m dish at one of the DTV birds, you wouldn't have a problem with rain fade either. (you'd have a bigger problem keeping it properly aimed, btw.)

  3. Re:1500 channels and nothing to watch by TGK · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Bullshit. I work for Dish, we have 100 or so local markets but to say that we need to provide locals to everyone if we provide locals to Atlanta doesn't make any sense.

    Plain and simple, there are people out there who don't get local channels. There are people out there who do get local channels. As no action has been taken, we can only assume you to be wrong on this point.

    What you probably meant is that if Dish provides NBC, ABC, CBS etc for the Atlanta area, they have to make the same pricing scheme available to other local channels in the Atlanta area. They can't just carry the big names and shut the little guy out. They also can't charge lower interest channels a premium rate to be uplinked.

    That does make for ugly bandwidth problems, but remember this is directional. Dish (for example) has satelites at the following orbital locations 119 110 61.5 148 121 105. The doubleing capacity attainable by opening up another band there is huge. More to the point though, is that those low demand channels aren't on the valuable realestate (119 110), they get shunted over to the wings (148, 61.5). There's not as much of a crunch as you think...

    --
    Killfile(TGK)
    No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
  4. Re:Rain Fade by dougmc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    my understanding is that they will do it in the same way that they get away with using the little dishes, pumping a huge amount of power out.
    It's a satellite. Powered by solar cells. As much as they'd probably love to pump a `huge amount of power out', they don't have a huge amount of power to pump with. According to this link, the solar cells (which are huge!) of this satellite put out 4.3 kW of power. Which is a lot, but I imagine that's peak power, and the satellite cannot be in the sun all the time, so it's got to charge batteries for night time use, and it's transmitters are not 100% efficient ...

    All in all, I doubt it can put out 1000 watts of RF power 24/7. Compare that to your local FM station that probably broadcasts with 100,000 watts and only serves an area with an 60 mile or so radius. At high frequencies, you don't need a large dish for high gain (doubling the frequency generally doubles the gain), so the little dishes do the job.

    Still, that's pretty impressive. 4.3 kW of power for a satellite? And the new ones are likely to be even bigger. (For comparison, Voyager broadcasts with 13 watts of power. Of course, it's power source is probably nuclear.)

    With 4.3 kW of power coming in at peak (and never mind that solar cells aren't very efficient, so there's several times that amount of heat being collected by the solar cells), I wonder how they keep it cool. In space, you can't just tack on a big fan ... you need to radiate your heat into space.

  5. This will be the killer application for satellite by barfy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First TiVo just works better with satellite than over the air, because it just copies the satellites digital signal rather than recompressing the stream.

    Second, HD looks GREAT on a SD TV. I have been a satellite subscriber since day one because local cable was aweful. It used to have a great picture, but the channel squeeze forced bit rates down so low it was like watching a good streaming internet image (crappy).

    But I now have HDTiVo hooked up to a very nice SD set (XBR2) and a very nice HD projector (NEC HT1000). The projector is great for movies, but is just too big for watching TV. But HD channels on the SD set are some of the best quality TV around.

    This will benefit all subscribers by getting high enough bandwidth for all stations, and more HD than will be provided by my local provider. I am just disappointed it is going to take 3 years to get up and running.

  6. They already have football in HD by weedenbc · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This year Fox and CBS are carrying several games each week in glorious HD. If you are a HD subscriber and a Sunday Ticket subscriber you get several of those games in HD each, plus every game in SD, plus the Sunday night ESPN games.

    I'm drooling already waiting for Sunday.

    --

    "Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
  7. Re:Rain Fade by dougmc · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I found another link which isn't what I'd call authoritative, but suggests that the (newer? Boeing 701 vs Boeing 601?) DTV satellites put out 3.5 kW of RF power. Which is still a lot, but still nothing compared to a single FM radio station. Of course, it helps not having to go through buildings, trees, etc. And having an antenna with a nice bit of gain over a simple dipole (if you're lucky) for the FM band.

    I believe the systems used to talk to submarines using the extremely low frequency bands (ELF) use something like three megawatts of power ...

  8. Scientific Satellite Interference by bleckywelcky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've worked on scientific satellite designs and the Ka band is quite frequently used for downloading data from satellites to Earth. I would like to know what specific ranges of the Ka band Direct TV will be allowed to use, the article does not mention this information. If media content providers are allowed to move in on frequencies that are typically used for scientific satellites (or even close enough to cause interference), costs for obtaining this data and processing it could increase immensely. Or even worse, communication time could be reduced or even eliminated. Hopefully Direct TV will be constained enough that they don't impinge on these scientific efforts.

  9. Re:DirectTV HDTV by charyou-tree · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's been a few months (April) since I've been able to watch the DirecTV HD package. Has it improved at all?

    At that time,

    ESPN
    Sucked. 90% of their programming was SD upconverts. Worse, they streeeeetched the image to 16:9 which distorted the picture and made it physically painful to watch. They had some nicely done Sunday night football games last year.

    Discovery HD
    Nice, but incredibly repetitive. The channel was on a 4 hour loop most of the time.

    HDMovies (Movie channel showing various movies from classics to recent favorites)
    Sucked in a major way. 90%+ old retread movies. Sure, "Endless Summer" was cool to watch, the first of the 7,312 times they broadcast it.

    HDNet - pretty much a worthless channel showing repeats of recent Nascar Races, Horse, Races, and concerts. They also have some original series on it (I think).
    Good for MLS games, if you're into that, which I am.

    Now they've added BravoHD to the $10.99 HD package, which was part of a deal they had with NBC over the Olympics. Rumor has it they're going to push some SciFi channel programming onto Bravo, which would be cool.

    CBSHD - I live in Utah and they allow me to pick up the CBS HD feed from LA. This is great because I can watch my shows an hour later in HD without needing the off air ant.
    Don't knock OTA antennas, if you can get a signal. A one-time expense of under $100 and a few hours installing an antenna in my attic got me perfect recepton of ABC, CBS, and NBC digital broadcast. The picture from local stations is typically compressed less than DBS signals, and it's free.

    It's too bad that getting a waiver from a local station, even if you can't get their signal, is a nightmare most places. I can't get Fox, at all, and I'm not real hopeful about being able to get it over DirecTV, even when they start offering it.

    I also enjoy watching Golf in High def on the weekends. You can tell a HUGE DIFFERENCE between the shows in HD and regular shows. People come over and just say WOW to the sporting events. Movies are not that much different.
    I agree, HD is incredible. I could watch paint dry in HD, but I'm not sure if I could make myself watch golf. :-)

    Cons:
    No STINKING TIVO!!!!!! I can't wait for the HDTivo to be affordable.
    Agreed. They need a standalone HD DVR model that doesn't force us to hock our existing HD STBs on eBay.

  10. Re:Rain Fade by johannesg · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Heat can be transferred through conduction or radiation. You are right that there is no conduction in space, but radiation still occurs (that's how solar heat gets to us). The problem is that radiation is far less effective than conduction, thus temperature management of any spacecraft is indeed a major issue. For this reason any new spacecraft design undergoes thorough thermal testing in a specially designed vacuum facility.

    While I cannot claim to be an expert on thermal analysis, I have been working as a software expert in ESA's spacecraft testing centre for the past six years, writing and maintaining the software used to gather, process, and present thermal data during thermal testing. The big device in the top-left corner of the image is ESA's Large Space Simulator, and the little room a little to the right of that is my office ;-)

    A thermal test typically lasts a few weeks, and we would typically be gathering data from 1500-2000 sensors (mostly thermocouples and PT100's) on the spacecraft, plus another 1000-1500 from the facility itself (depending on configuration). This adds up to a couple of gigabytes worth of data.

    Right now the first ATV (the Autonomous Transfer Vehicle that is scheduled to bring freight to ISS starting next year or so) is being prepped for testing, somewhere at the end of this year.

    Since this is /., I should probably add that for presentation and control of the system we use a mix of HP-UX (for historical reasons) and Windows XP PC's. Our main server is an aging HP-UX machine, which we will soon be replacing by a Linux solution. I've been gently pushing Linux for a while now, but one of my problems is that many of the acquisition systems require GPIB support which is hard to find under Linux (there are no drivers available for HP cards).

    There are guided tours from the Space Expo, if you are interested.