Talk:Satellite television

Review page contents
The content of this page should be reviewed.

1) Why link commercial services - Is this advertisment or wikipedia?

2) Why exagerating the influence of pay-tv services, e.g. sky television? Well they were the first who signed a contract with SES-Astra to rent a transponder. But there were many others at the same, including many free tv-stations. This article suggests that satellite-tv is always pay-tv.

3) DBS has many synonyms. The first DBS-System-Provider calls it DTH Direct to Home.

4) The distinction between DBS and TVRO-Systems is weird. It first suggests that TVRO-Systems are analog and one way. Aftwerwards it points out that digital tv like DVB is a TVRO-System. DK: TVRO is for TeleVision Receive Only. In that sense, yes it is a one-way communications path.  They may be analog or digital, but that depends on the source of the signal being transmitted.


 * Agree. 18.24.0.120 23:05, 25 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. I was just about to comment on the proliferation of commercial links as well. I think possibly we should cut them all - the ones that are worthy of being linked are probably also worthy of their own articles, so the external links can go there, as is the case with British Sky Broadcasting, for example. - IMSoP 15:29, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Television
There should an article or a detailed information procedure about HOW SIGNALS UPLINK. i.e from SDI or analog signals what are the other devices involved in the uplinking for example multiplexer to modulator to equilizer to upconvertor to HPA then go to satellite.

DK: I can provide an extremely detailed an explanatory diagram on how the signals are sent from the ground station to the satellite and downlinked to the receiving stations. I can provide as much information as is requested for all users. 12/26/2007

Grey Market
The much more common situation now is for americans to want canadian programming -- canadian satellite services provide more channels for better prices and often include british and australian programming not available in the US.

Not sure how to edit this in.


 * I believe the term "reverse grey market" is used to describe these systems, although the lack of choice of providers for premium movie channels, the more limited sports coverage, the inferior selection of ethnic and Spanish-language channels would be a severe downside. The only advantage (other than price) offered by the Canadian system is in BBC and CBC news or perhaps in French-language programming. --carlb 05:11, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Extraneous links
Following my comments above, from a long time ago, I've got rid of all the external links that just point at one commercial site. The individual companies nearly all have their own Wikipedia articles, so the links should be in those; in case some of them aren't, I'll put all the links I removed here so the information isn't "lost". - IMSoP 00:33, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * DirecTV homepage (USA)
 * DISH Network homepage (USA)
 * EchoStar International Corporation - Homepage (Europe, Africa, Middle East)
 * Bell ExpressVu homepage (Canada)
 * StarChoice homepage (Canada)
 * Sky Television homepage (U.K.)
 * Sky PerfecTV! homepage (Japan)
 * DirecTV Latin America homepage (Latin America)
 * Multichoice homepage (South Africa and southern Africa).
 * Astra (Europe)
 * The Filipino Channel (Philippines)
 * SKY Television (was linked in the South America section; looks like a Brazillian domain)
 * http://www.ses-astra.com (was just mentionned in the middle of the text, in reference to SES Astra)

Too much Pay-TV
I agree, this page looks like a commercial for pay-tv-services.

1) the distinction between TVRO and DTH is totally obsolete, cause the market share of non-KU-band sattelite TV-homes is almost 0%. Looks more like: DTH pay-tv = good - TVRO Free-to-air = bad.
 * Sorry in India, or countries like that there is no freedom in law for Ku band receivers, and You can only use C band satellite receivers
 * Therefore if you look at global matters C band is still alive
 * I suppose the law is that Ku band is reserved for cable tv operators, to gain unfair advantages over freedom stripped ordinary citizen
 * And India has like 20% Earth population, and a lot of them speak or understand English, and there are other countries
 * I may agree that TVRO and DTH is totally obsolete
 * And there is little info about DiSEqC and its practicality — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.187.202.138 (talk) 17:42, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

2) Pay-TV services are totally exagerated. OK in the US most DTH-Services are Pay-TV.

But in Europe they are not. DTH is simply one possibility (like cable-tv, terrestrial antennas, or ADSL) to receive TV-Programmes. And its not True for Europe, that DTH uses proprietary receivers, most just use standard DVB-S. Even if you receive TV-Programmes via cable, you often primarily pay for the transport service not the content. In many countries there are broadcast stations regulated by public law. these are often free-to-view and often have a quite attractive programme, e.g. in UK BBC1-4, BBC World-Service or in Germany ARD and ZDF with its over 20 broadcast stations. In some countries there are dozens of free-to-air broadcast stations, that can be viewes via DTH. With DTH you can subscribe additional pay-TV-content from any Pay-TV-Service you want, somethimes single TV-Stations, sometimes big packages. OK, some Pay-TV-Services force you to use proprietary-equipment to rule out competitors, like BSkyB does.

So my point is: This Wikipedia-article reflects only the view of US-Pay-TV-Services, but not the general nature of satellite television, which is more: You can receive anything from anywhere.

Overly North American centric
This article is overly north-american centric and makes huge assumptions about satellite systems that are only applicable in North America.

I'm going to completely rewrite the article in a few days if nothings done, this is advanced warning. --Kiand 14:15, 5 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Rather than a complete re-write, could I suggest you instead break it down into appropriate sections and add to the article as warranted? Seems as though that would be better.


 * On a related note, though, to be fair, the satellite TV thing (at least, mass-market satellite TV) did get its start with North American companies, so it's at least understandable that the majority of the discussion here is centered on that region.--chris.lawson 03:07, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
 * By what, two/three years? Its also far less common, far less standardised and far less exploited in North America than in Europe these days.
 * Some sections of this article need to be either just removed or split off - and the whole DBS/TVRO stuff is terminology used solely in North America - possibly because generally half the channels in a 'package' here are free to air anyway. Expanding is, generally, not an option when an article is utterly slanted. --Kiand 07:23, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Critism??
The critism as it stands is veyr poor. "slow menus" ? Totally personal. There is no reason to explain why cable systems have faster screens then satellite recievers.

Something about economics? Something about long contracts? Something about expensive upgrade-plans? Channel selection versus alternatives? Quality?

All of this is USA specific, how are other countries with regards to this?


 * I have deleted the entire section as it was indeed not clear how this is a criticism of satellite television per se; for reference, it consisted of these two sentences:
 * Satellite receivers have had slow channel menus that customers have had to wait several seconds to go through while searching for their favorite channel. Other cable receivers have fast menus that satellite reveivers can't match their pace with.
 * There may of course be a clearer way of making whatever point the original author intended here, in which case by all means add it back in... - IMSoP 14:49, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Caption needed
The link to Image:Antenne-toroidale.jpg needs a caption, but I'm not sure what it's there to illustrate. -- Beland 05:45, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

some countries hate ku?
At "get around legislation by some countries against reception of K[u]-band transmissions." say why those countries have that legislation.

Say how many MHz is each band at.

Weasel Words
In section "Satellite television by continent and country" quite many weasel words are used, like "unquestioningly," "up to a million by some estimates" and "often heated debate". I have marked the offending section--it needs major non-POV work. --KJRehberg 20:12, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Satellite HD-TV Broadcast Resolution
What resolution HD signal do satellite companies broadcast in their HD-TV programs? (Emk52 01:45, 13 October 2006 (UTC))

== More on history and some links I've added some history of the evolution of satellite TV and LNBs. Also I've added the link to Steve Birkill's history (one of the key people in the creation of the DTH satellite television industry in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Some of the links need a bit of cleaning. I've deleted a linkspam for DirecTV. It has been a few years since I wrote about satellite television technology.--Jmccormac 20:12, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Home satellite dishes
Can a person turn a home dish into usable solar energy, like a solar panel? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.118.120.190 (talk) 22:37, 14 March 2007 (UTC).
 * I suspect you'll have more success with your questions at the Science help desk. Antonrojo 13:29, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Migrated editorial comment
This comment was included in article text, so I moved it here for discussion. I think editoral comments only belong if they are commented out or indicated with templates:

''Copyright violation text removed from this location, discussing growth and decline of TVRO satellite television in the United States from 1980 to today. Please rewrite this section.''

Antonrojo 13:29, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Proprietary?
"DBS systems are generally based on proprietary transport stream encoding and/or encryption requiring proprietary reception equipment."

DVB-S is an open standard. I've removed the whole paragraph. Totsugeki 09:58, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I've added the reference to DVB-S and also clarified the use of Conditional Access Modules as add-ons for a basic receiver.--Jmccormac 00:24, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Satellite television in the United States
What are we waiting for? This section is getting too long and unwieldy. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 20:17, 23 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I have now split out all of the regional stuff to a new article and the US info to its own one.

Web site change has messed me up
I am unable to find Broadcasting & Cable's updates on the satellite TV legislation. The web site added a new search function. I just checked a library database which has been of no help. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 20:52, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Large sections copied from howstuffworks.com
Editing urgently needed. The sections "Broadcasting centers", "Programming" and other have been copied from howstuffworks.com. Not only that it is absolutely illegal, the text is also full of errors (e.g. MPEG-2 compression is not the only one).
 * Thanks for removing that howstuffworks material. It was really poor quality text. Jmccormac (talk) 01:16, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Contradiction / needed cleanups
RE: this article version Was cleaning up some related Satellite TV articles and noticed quite a few problems. Under "Categories of usage" the article states DBS (is) also known as "Direct-To-Home". According to this reference that statement is wrong. Direct-To-Home is an overall classification for home use Satellite TV and DBS, TVRO, etc are all sub types of DTH. The redirect of Direct To Home to DBS is also wrong, "Direct To Home" should link to this article. The "Direct to Home television" section of "Categories of usage" is unreferenced and is a redundant or contradictory description of the "Direct broadcast via satellite" section, i.e. take the same term and describes it again or as something different, a third thing. There are also other cleanups I noticed like a redundant Big ugly dish article (should probably be rolled into Television receive-only) and a general poor linking and set/subset confusion with all these articles. This article seems to have evolved into a WP:SUMMARY article and should probably follow that style, i.e. this article is the overall description of the common term Satellite television and then leads the reader to all the reference sub types. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 16:43, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Removing Scraped and Cut and Pasted Content
I've removed content that has been scraped and cut and pasted from websites and content farms elsewhere on the web. Some of these websites are just blogs and unreliable sources (WP:RS). The history of Satellite TV may need a few paragraphs but cutting and pasting from other websites (and even changing a few words) is not how Wikipedia articles are created or developed. Some references are reliable but there's the conflation of Satellite TV with Conditional Access Systems (VideoCipher II etc) while these subjects are covered in their own articles on Wikipedia. Jmccormac (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * And I have reverted you again. If you look at the sources, you will see that the text on the page is indeed not copy-pasted from the sources. For instance, ref 4 references a sentence in the article that says "The world's first commercial communications satellite, called Intelsat I (nicknamed "Early Bird"), was launched into synchronous orbit on April 6, 1965," while the source says "American communications satellite. One launch, 1965.04.06. Intelsat 1, also called Early Bird, was the world's first commercial communications satellite." Another example would be the sentence that says "In October 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which gave those using TVRO systems the right to receive signals for free unless they were scrambled, and required those who did scramble to make their signals available for a reasonable fee." The source is a news, not encyclopedic article. Most of the sources are reliable news or encyclopedia articles, which meet WP:NEWSORG and WP:WPNOTRS. You also claimed that the madehow source is linkspam. I was, again, using a tertiary source, which WP:WPNOTRS says are OK for giving overviews or summaries, but should not be used for detailed descriptions, and if you notice, I did not include many sources like this. I added summaries of things covered in other articles, such as about Captain Midnight and Videocipher, not detailed descriptions; those are found in the separate articles. I am currently working to add more of a worldwide viewpoint to the history section, but do not remove the content; please continue to discuss on the talk page; irrelevant reasons will be disregarded. If you continue to do so, you may be in danger of breaking WP:3RR.Qxukhgiels (talk) 17:22, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There are sections in that content that are copied and pasted from other websites. The Madehow link is linkspam and seems to be content scraped from a few sources. Some of it is barely literate English and the page has Google Adsense advertising on it. The "world view" sections were moved to the Satellite TV by country pages in 2010. You don't seem to be relying on what you find on the web rather than on published or reliable sources. A lot of that scraped content on the web is flawed. The newspaper references are generally accurate. Those sections need serious editing by someone clueful about the events and history of the early days of satellite TV. Jmccormac (talk) 19:10, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I've spent some time editing the sections into passable English with many of the same references still in place. At least they appear to flow more logically now and don't look like an exploded paper shredder. Jmccormac (talk) 23:43, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Corrected section about first satellite TV satellites. Relay 1 was not launched until December 1962. Telstar transmitted satellite TV on 23 July 1962. Telstar was over the Atlantic ocean, rather than North America, so that the stations on both sides of the Atlantic could "see" the satellite. It was only visible to both continents for approximately 23 minutes. Syncom 1 suffered an electronics failure during launch. Jmccormac (talk) 01:07, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Reliable Sources /Scraping Wikipedia and presenting it as a reference
The UKessays references are not reliable. One of them even cites the Wikipedia pages that it has scraped for the "essay" and it is even taking sections of the various satellite TV pages verbatim. Jmccormac (talk) 21:34, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * No, it's obvious that most of that material in the essays did not come from WP, as even a paraphrased version of the bulk of the material in that article does not exist on WP; it was not "scraped" from WP as you say.


 * This is the "essay" that churns the content from Wikipedia. These are the links it cites in its "bibliography".

8. Bibliography

(1) Satellite television, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_television

(2) Direct-broadcast satellite, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, For the Japanese communication satellite, see Broadcasting Satellite (Japanese). Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-broadcast_satellite

(3) Television in the United Kingdom, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "United Kingdom television" redirects here. For the digital cable and satellite television network, see UKTV. Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_the_United_Kingdom

(4) DIRECT BROADCAST SATELLITE, Satellite Delivery Technology Website: http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=directbroadc

The main discussion of the technology of satellite TV receivers is a straight lift with some words changed by someone ignorant of the technology (replacing the word 'amplified' with 'increased' etc) and just churning the content. Some of it has been so badly churned that it is no longer even coherent English.

Jmccormac (talk) 22:02, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yep, that's pretty clear circular referencing and not permitted. While not exact, it's pretty similar in places. Even without that, however, they are "student essays", and are very likely not sufficient to be considered a reliable source, even without Wikipedia being used as a reference. If it cannot be done without a source then it shouldn't be done, that doesn't mean we can use an inappropriate source. The ukessay source cannot be used as a reference because it is not a reliable source. - Aoidh (talk) 22:26, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

WP:LEAD
Per ' edit reinstate User:Sladen's change (but which didn't actually restore it, I've made a follow-up edit that (hopefully) does what was intended). Please review and check. —Sladen (talk) 20:13, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes it did. I reinstated it all minus the first section, which I had modified. I have restored that modification now.Qxukhgiels (talk) 20:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

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Causes of uplink and downlink signal loss?
The article currently says "The downlink satellite signal, quite weak after traveling the great distance (see inverse-square law) ..."

I would guess the beams to be a Collimated beam as far as practical, and so the reduction in signal is due to attenuation and diffraction in the atmosphere, not principally inverse-square law.

Does anybody have good information on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.19.3.149 (talk) 12:04, 13 June 2022 (UTC)


 * ... answering my own question: The uplink might conceivably be perfectly focussed, as it's a point-to-point link. The downlink, however, covers a cdountry- or continent-sized area, a beam angle in the order of degrees, and so has significant inverse-square loss.
 * In either case, atmospheric water is also significant.
 * I replaced the references to inverse-square law with references to the more-general path loss to cover the complexity. 88.19.3.149 (talk) 13:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

How this article could be improved
A lot of information is listed twice, and more information about how satellite TV in the modern era could be useful, instead of the majority of the history being from the 1980s. MightyArms (talk) 17:05, 16 January 2023 (UTC)