7. America and the World
Satellite communications is an international business, with satellites orbiting the globe and programming transmitted from space heedless of national borders. Multinational media companies such as Rupert Murdoch’s Australia-based News Corp. seek to expand into new markets. Among U.S. DBS providers, DirecTV has been most active in pursuing joint ventures and other opportunities abroad.
American
Canada, Mexico, and some South American countries hold some of the orbital slots over the Western Hemisphere that could service the United States. If any of these choose to auction off transponder rights, U.S. companies can bid for them. Likewise, U.S. companies can potentially service other markets in the Americas from their own slots. Nations may attempt to control the industry by regulating the sale of decoders; in 1998 Argentina temporarily halted DirecTV from competing in its market while it tried to get its own system in place.
Europe
Europe has its own active DBS market. Luxembourg-based Soci?t? Europ?enne des Satellites S.A. (SES) operates ASTRA, the leading satellite system, which served more than 74 million homes in Europe in 1999. More than 31 million European homes receive programming directly to a satellite dish via ASTRA. British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), the first service provider to offer DBS in the United Kingdom (1989), relies on an ongoing contractual agreement with SES. In 10 years, the Isleworth, UK-based company has amassed 3.6 million DBS subscribers and 2.6 million cable subscribers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where broadcast television consists of five channels. By holding broadcast rights to the leading soccer leagues in England and Scotland, the British satellite service has also become the largest pay-TV provider.
Asia
Japan
Asia, home of 60% of the world’s population, is a tempting target for telecommunications companies, but DBS growth there been hampered by political and economic conditions. Japan, which can be completely covered from one orbital position and where cable television never really took off due to heavy regulation, has the most advanced satellite technology in Asia. Challenges for Japanese DBS include the Asian financial troubles of the late 1990s, a conservative business environment, and a lack of demand for Japanese-language programming outside of the domestic market. As of May 1998, SkyPerfecTV had more than 700,000 subscribers in Japan, and DirecTV Japan had topped 100,000.
China
China is reluctant to allow direct broadcast to its population of 1.2 billion because of political concerns about western influences. Murdoch, whose base in Australia makes his News Corp. a natural contender in Asia and the Pacific Rim, antagonized the Chinese government by declaring that satellite television would undermine totalitarian regimes, and was subsequently constrained to low-profile participation in partnership ventures with Hong Kong and others.
Reacting to the boom in home television sets throughout that region of the world, APT Satellite Holdings Limited stepped up its efforts to secure licenses to offer DBS to homes in China and Southeast Asia. The Hong Kong-based company provides satellite service to 100 countries, mainly serving television stations, local cable operators, and master antenna systems.
India
In 1997, India, which also feared excessive western influences on its population of almost 1 billion, banned direct-to-home satellite television broadcast services. Amid a furor, which included a lawsuit by News Corp., it declared that the ban would only be temporary, until the government could set up a broadcast authority. A bill to establish the regulatory agency has since been introduced in India’s Parliament.
Oceania
In a short time, Sky Network Television Limited has signed up 260,000 subscribers in New Zealand for its five pay-TV channels and analog DBS programming. The Auckland-based company is partly controlled by Independent Newspapers, which is partly owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.
8. Future Development
Advanced compression schemes allow multiple streams of programming, along with the ability to control information per transponder frequency, made DBS feasible, and research and development continues in this area. Squeezing down the signal still further would be an advantage, but providers also want to eliminate the occasional blocky digital compression artifacts that some viewers find distracting. With High Definition Television (HDTV) on the horizon, three or four times more bandwidth (or three or four times better compression) will be required to provide the same number of channels. Currently, each DBS provider uses its own format for transmitting the signal. An emerging world standard, DVB, uses MPEG-2 and also attempts to standardize other elements of the system. Still, even DVB-compliant systems from different providers are not interchangeable.
In addition to HDTV, demand for local channels drives the push for more bandwidth. Besides improving compression, other areas of technological development include higher-power transponders, which allow more information to pass through existing bandwidth because less error-correcting coding is required. Signal polarization, controlling the orientation of the electromagnetic wave transmissions, is used to isolate adjacent transponder slots and allow more of them within a fixed-frequency spectrum. Statistical multiplexing maximizes the use of existing bandwidth by assigning it upon demand, depending on the information density of a particular program being carried by a channel at a given time.
Another approach to the bandwidth problem might be to expand it using spot-beam broadcasts to individual markets, although satellites capable of such transmissions in the DBS frequency spectrum did not yet exist as of mid-1998. Capital Broadcasting of Raleigh, North Carolina plans to provide local programming packages from a satellite with 61 beams by about 2001.
Technological development is also addressing the problem of “rain fade,” when thunderstorms and other weather disturbances interfere with the DBS signal. Currently, satellite transmissions are focused to provide more power to wetter regions within the coverage area.
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