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It's the Beginning of the End of Satellite TV in the US (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "We've launched our last satellite," John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, said in a meeting with analysts on Nov. 29. The AT&T executive effectively declared the end of the satellite-TV era with that statement. AT&T owns DirecTV, the US's largest satellite company -- and second largest TV provider overall, behind Comcast. DirecTV will continue offering satellite-TV service -- it had nearly 20 million satellite video subscribers as of September, per company filings. But the company will focus on growing its online video business instead, Donovan said.
It has a new set-top box, where people can get the same TV service they'd get with satellite, through an internet-connected box they can install themselves. It expects that box to become a greater share of its new premium-TV service installations in the first half of 2019. It also sells cheaper, TV packages with fewer channels through its DirecTV Now and WatchTV streaming services, which work with many smart TVs and streaming media players like Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices. The practice of getting TV through satellite dishes propped up in backyards and perched on rooftops first took hold in the US in the last 1970s and early 1980s, after TV networks like HBO and Turner Broadcasting System started sending TV signals to cable providers via satellites. People in areas without cable or broadcast TV began putting up their own dishes to receive the TV signals, and that grew into a TV business of its own.
It has a new set-top box, where people can get the same TV service they'd get with satellite, through an internet-connected box they can install themselves. It expects that box to become a greater share of its new premium-TV service installations in the first half of 2019. It also sells cheaper, TV packages with fewer channels through its DirecTV Now and WatchTV streaming services, which work with many smart TVs and streaming media players like Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices. The practice of getting TV through satellite dishes propped up in backyards and perched on rooftops first took hold in the US in the last 1970s and early 1980s, after TV networks like HBO and Turner Broadcasting System started sending TV signals to cable providers via satellites. People in areas without cable or broadcast TV began putting up their own dishes to receive the TV signals, and that grew into a TV business of its own.
What makes you think it's a signal issue? If you're surrounded by people whose only broadband is cellular and a rural tower is covering dozens of square miles, your share may not be much.
Sure, it is all you need, but good luck if someone in your home wants to do something else at the same time. I live in a rural area and we have to pause any streaming video if one of us opens a website with too many pictures on it. The worst is those pages where it decides to load megabytes of data if I scroll to far. The stream gets interrupted, and then we have to wait for it to get reestablished. A single 5 second burst of traffic can cause the stream to drop for five minutes or longer as it tries to restart it. Oh and commercials, those cause problems too. They load in HD no matter what, so the stream chokes when they buffer in the background, then chokes trying to show them, then chokes again about 30 seconds into the stream, since the next part loaded while the commercial was playing and then the server drops the connection as the player is waiting for it to play because it doesn't download any new chunks.