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DirecTV's 1st MPEG4 Satellite Launch Successful
tivoKlr writes "Looks like the 1st Spaceway satellite to provide "1500 channels of HD" has made it successfully into space. MPEG4 compression and local HD channels, something that the cable company can't offer in my area." Unfortunately the new satellite obsoletes the HD Tivo, and there's no word on when there will be a new one.
Of course the content will have to be in HD as well. But this always has been the chicken and the egg problem, without a network to broadcast HD content, why create it?
jason
Managed Hosting
I believe the High Def Tivo uses MPEG2 for its data streams, won't be capable of decoding the MPEG4 streams.
Digital TV has 18 different formats (resolutions), 6 of which are considered "HD". A couple of them are equivalent to NTSC resolution; 640x480 pixels. So NTSC stuff would presumably be broadcast in the standard appropriate digital format, taking up less bandwidth than one of the HD formats.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Has anyone had a chance to personally see MPEG4-encoded HD? Is the quality acceptable compared to the original MPEG2 stream?
I have to imagine that by recompressing into MPEG4 from MPEG2 (the format the signals are provided in, at least currently), some quality would be lost. The question is, how much quality is DirectTV prepared to sacrifice in order to say that they have the entire country covered with HD locals?
Personally, I'm sticking with cable because I want the original MPEG2 stream passed through without any recompression, and I don't want to watch TV without DVR features.
Actually, no they couldn't have. For one reason. Bandwidth. They are completely maxed out right now. They couldn't have added 1 more HD channel, let alone 1500 additional HD channels. Each HD channel is something like 15 SD channel.
The only reason they are able to do this is because they are going to be transmitting using a different band - KA. The current DirecTV sattelites transmit in the KU band. So they'll be using their existing orbital slots 101, 110, & 119 to broadcast on a different wavelenght.
Unfortunately this is going to be mean a larger dish will be required. Google dish network superdish for an idea of how big it is. Dish Network already does broadcast some local channels in KA band.
The "killer technology" on the Spaceway birds are their ability to form tight "spot beams" using Ka band (~20 Ghz) downlink signals.
The spot beams are formed using a 1500 element phased array. The array can form as many as 780 downlink spot beams and 112 uplink spot beams across the US. Compare this with a typical Ku-band (~12 GHz) satellite which has a single beam over the entire US.
Spaceway uses digital regenerative switching of up to 10 Gbps, as opposed to the analog transponders of most geosynchronous communications satellites (despite the fact that most of those transponders are used with digital services these days).
Spaceway was originally supposed to provide satellite point-to-point and point-to-multipoint IP connectivity, but that was dropped in favor of providing massive localized HDTV capacity using spot beams.
Unfortunately, Ka band is more sensitive to rain fade outages than Ku band.
Who actually asked for higher resolution? Are they acting on customer demand or have they just decided that we should have it? The reason I say this is that I would rather have higher bandwidth channels than higher resolution ones. Compression artifacts annoy me much more than a low resolution picture does. They don't seem to be able to transmit TV in the current resolution without severely degrading the picture. Any "visualphile" will know that a decent analogue signal usually looks a lot better than it's digital equivalent (ref: I'm comparing Digital Terrestrial to Digital Satellite and Cable services available in the UK).
Perhaps I'm biassed because I'm in the UK and therefore have 625 lines instead of the appauling 480 line TVs the poor Americans have to put up with (no wonder they're screaming for HDTV!).
My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts...
Maybe with Fiber To The Home we might actually get enough bandwidth to watch the channels we want at the resolution we want, without thinking that it looks like your TV has gone though 4 copes of RealPlayer...
I find that a beer helps. No, really, patience is required in pointing these multi-bird dishes, and I find a cold beer helps calm the nerves and give you somehting to do during the process.
I've re-mounted my 3LNB D* dish several times, and I always take out a receiver and an old 13" TV with me to do the job. It may take 30 minuts or so to get it just right, but hey, I' mostly sitting on my butt drinking a beer and watching TV (well, the set upscreen).
Besides, nothing gives the new neighbors a first impression like seeing the "new guy" sitting on his roof watching TV and drinking a beer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You make an interesting point, but after considering it carefully, I respectfully disagree with everything you just said.
They provide a service that I'm willing to pay for -- media content delivery. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. I don't want the government launching these satellites, because I don't want the government controlling the content. Furthermore, since governments don't own satellite airspace, governments don't get to license it. This leads me to some other questions for you: Because airplanes fly over your airspace, should they be made available to all citizens? It's really only wealthy citizens, businesses, and governments who can own and operate these vehicles -- very similar to satellites. What's the ultimate difference between a company launching a dozen satellites in geosynchronous orbit versus building a vast terrestrial distribution network? Should only governments be allowed to build these networks? In both cases (satellite and wired), the businesses own the infrastructure, and the consumer simply pays for service. It covers both media licensing and distribution costs. This way, the networks are able to get around government censorship of what they broadcast -- terrestrial television and radio broadcasts are still subject to this censorship. I generally do not patronize those services due to this censorship. Personally, I find the censorship far more obscene than the content they are trying to protect me from.
As far as the service rendered, it's entertainment. Does it benefit us? It depends on how much you value entertainment. One man's junk is another man's gold. When we buy it, it's a choice. When the government provides it, we're all paying for it whether we like it or not.
Finally, as far as I know, the sky is open to anyone who wants to put something up there (providing that they acquire the necessary licenses from whatever applicable aerospace governing administration for their launch vehicle). There are two problems: building these communication devices is very expensive and putting them in place is extremely expensive. The only groups who seem to have the cash to do such a thing are goverments and businesses. It sounds an awful lot like you're begrudging them of their money and their ability to send up satellites on their whim.
-Turkey
Who cares what the difference is between sat. and cable? Who cares how high quality the image is? What matters is the content itself and right now it sucks big time. It amazes how much people are willing to pay for utter crap and the privilege of being advertised at. Take the guy who replied to you and stated that he pays close to $130 for TV and internet... I won't call him a fool because it could be worth it to him, but I wouldn't dream of spending a quarter that.