A customer asked me this the other day and I’ve been meaning to write about it. He asked,
In order to understand why a round dish isn’t likely, you have to understand why people use big oval dishes today.
Today’s oval-shaped dishes point at multiple satellite locations at once. Traditionally, DISH used three locations, while DIRECTV used five, as you see above. Today, DIRECTV uses three locations and DISH uses two. If the providers wanted to, they could make smaller dishes, although not totally round ones. In the picture above, think how much smaller that dish would be if it only had to pull in the three rightmost signals.
In order to get to a truly round dish though, you’d need to cut down to one location. That would be hard for DISH and practically impossible for DIRECTV.
DISH has a fleet of mostly conventional communications satellites, spread out evenly among two banks of two locations. In order to get down to that round dish they would need to abandon their entire fleet and launch a new mega-satellite at one location. The satellite locations DISH uses are crowded and that’s not likely to happen.
The path forward is a little easier if you’re DIRECTV. The company operates satellites in the crowded 101 degree location, but most of its HD and 4K — in fact almost all of it — come from school-bus-sized satellites at the 99 and 103 degree locations. There’s a similarly-sized satellite at the 101 location, but using all of its capacity would require people to change their dish. It wouldn’t be optional, which means it could take a very long time to happen. Keep in mind DIRECTV is just now stopping standard-definition TV service, which broadcast TV stopped doing in 2009.
More importantly, DIRECTV would have to abandon several very large satellites and they wouldn’t have the extra capacity they might need if there ever are hundreds of 4K channels like we all want.
It’s not impossible. The issue is cost really. The company would have to develop a whole new dish, get it tested and approved, and then roll them out. That’s a very large expense and it isn’t likely to increase revenues. Most people are just fine with the oval dish.
At some point, I do expect some consolidation of pay-TV channels. A lot of pay-TV channels operate the way they did before people had DVRs. They air the same programming multiple times so you can watch it live. Sometimes they air it on multiple channels. Since the national pay-TV landscape has largely boiled down to three providers — Disney, Discovery Time Warner, and Paramount — it’s quite possible that these folks could change the way they provide their programming and the small number of other providers would probably follow suit.
Fewer channels doesn’t sound like a goal, but if there was less repetition of content, it would make satellite providers more confident in making their satellite fleets smaller, and that’s the point of this article.
The post What would it take to get back to the “round dish?” appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
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Never say never but…
In order to understand why a round dish isn’t likely, you have to understand why people use big oval dishes today.
Today’s oval-shaped dishes point at multiple satellite locations at once. Traditionally, DISH used three locations, while DIRECTV used five, as you see above. Today, DIRECTV uses three locations and DISH uses two. If the providers wanted to, they could make smaller dishes, although not totally round ones. In the picture above, think how much smaller that dish would be if it only had to pull in the three rightmost signals.
In order to get to a truly round dish though, you’d need to cut down to one location. That would be hard for DISH and practically impossible for DIRECTV.
The challenge if you’re DISH
DISH has a fleet of mostly conventional communications satellites, spread out evenly among two banks of two locations. In order to get down to that round dish they would need to abandon their entire fleet and launch a new mega-satellite at one location. The satellite locations DISH uses are crowded and that’s not likely to happen.
The challenge if you’re DIRECTV
The path forward is a little easier if you’re DIRECTV. The company operates satellites in the crowded 101 degree location, but most of its HD and 4K — in fact almost all of it — come from school-bus-sized satellites at the 99 and 103 degree locations. There’s a similarly-sized satellite at the 101 location, but using all of its capacity would require people to change their dish. It wouldn’t be optional, which means it could take a very long time to happen. Keep in mind DIRECTV is just now stopping standard-definition TV service, which broadcast TV stopped doing in 2009.
More importantly, DIRECTV would have to abandon several very large satellites and they wouldn’t have the extra capacity they might need if there ever are hundreds of 4K channels like we all want.
What about a “little smaller” dish?
It’s not impossible. The issue is cost really. The company would have to develop a whole new dish, get it tested and approved, and then roll them out. That’s a very large expense and it isn’t likely to increase revenues. Most people are just fine with the oval dish.
At some point, I do expect some consolidation of pay-TV channels. A lot of pay-TV channels operate the way they did before people had DVRs. They air the same programming multiple times so you can watch it live. Sometimes they air it on multiple channels. Since the national pay-TV landscape has largely boiled down to three providers — Disney, Discovery Time Warner, and Paramount — it’s quite possible that these folks could change the way they provide their programming and the small number of other providers would probably follow suit.
Fewer channels doesn’t sound like a goal, but if there was less repetition of content, it would make satellite providers more confident in making their satellite fleets smaller, and that’s the point of this article.
The post What would it take to get back to the “round dish?” appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
Continue reading...
