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Silver Member Username: ChevroletPost Number: 145 Registered: Sep-10 | C/P..........http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-14-2006-88989.asp The Future of Satellite TV If you have Dish Network or thinking about getting it or another satellite TV service, it's good to know what the future holds for satellite TV. So, here's a glimpse into the future. This article may be considered science fiction, just like Arthur C. Clark once had a scientific vision about 3 satellites orbiting the earth in geostationary orbits to make global communications possible. Everything in this article is merely a scientific vision and an extrapolation of current technologies into the future. What would be the future of Satellite TV? That may seem to be a difficult question, but extrapolating what we know about the past into the future and some educated guesses, we may very well end up with a reasonable picture of what the future of satellite TV looks like. The future of satellite TV will be guided by these properties: 1. Receive and Transmit 2. Equipment Size and Costs 3. Satellite Capacity and Coverage 4. Antenna Size 5. New Technologies 1 Receive and Transmit What would be possible if you could not only receive, but also transmit? And in the same bandwidth as you receive? That would change the whole world. It is possible now to use the satellite for Internet purposes, but in a very simple and inefficient way. You receive via satellite, but transmit via phone. Upload capacity is completely limited by the dial up connection. The idea of being able to transmit to a satellite from your home is new and will probably one day be reality. At the moment companies can use satellites to connect offices all over the country via satellite. Bandwidth is limited, or very expensive. Another problem for home use is the size of the satellite dish. At least 4 foot for small bandwidth and up to 10 feet or even more for higher bandwidths. In point 3 this bandwidth issue is explained in more detail. 2 Equipment Size and Costs Your Dish Network or Satellite TV equipment at home may seem small, but it is small because all it has to do is receive. Transmitting requires different equipment. Not so much in the house, but on the roof at the antenna there is need for a relative big transmitter. Also these are still pretty expensive and for domestic use just not affordable. In the future this will change. Equipment will get smaller, and cheaper. Eventually when satellites are able to relay much more data than now (see point 3), having 10.000.000 transmitters on the ground won't be a problem. 3 Satellite Capacity and Coverage This will always be the bottle neck of satellites; how much data can they relay and how small an area can they cover. A satellite has multiple dishes and each dish can cover a part of the earth; small parts like just one state or big parts like the whole continental United States. In the future satellites will be able to relay much more data, and cover much smaller areas. Especially the smaller coverage areas will be important. Having full capacity available for just a small area means higher bandwidth available for a small amount of people. Especially in urban areas it will be great to have a satellite cover just one neighborhood. 4 Antenna Size This is a very important issue. Small antennas of 18 inches already exist and are used by satellite TV providers such as Dish Network, but these can receive only. The opening angle of an antenna like this is too big to get enough signal power to reach the satellite. In the future however, antennas will get better and eventually small antennas can be used to transmit to the satellite. 5 New Technologies This will be the really interesting part. New technologies may open up possibilities that are never heard of before. Imagine watching a movie in 3D, you sitting on your couch but watching a show as if you are in the audience when the TV show was recorded. You're not really having a TV at home anymore, but a 3D entertainment room. (for those of you who like StarTrek, a not so strange idea). Normal Satellite TV will still be available of course. In the future Satellite TV will open up so many possibilities that it is hard to imagine what our lives will be like in 30, or even just 20 years from now. To give an idea of how fast things are going. 50 years ago, there was nothing in space that was made by humans. Now there are even satellite graveyards (specific orbits where obsolete satellites are "parked"). The possibilities of satellite TV technology are growing faster every year. What took 10 years to develop 30 years ago is now done in 2 years. Dish Network and Satellite TV is one of the driving forces for satellite technologies because the need to please million of subscribers is much stronger than the need to please the relative limited needs of communications for commercial purposes. The future of satellite TV is so bright, that a supernova would pale in comparison! |
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Diamond Member Username: NydasPost Number: 20035 Registered: Jun-06 | Netflix is a new service which offers movies and other TV programming via internet for a low price of $7-8 per month. As this article states, it is gaining tremendous momentum, enough to worry that the broadband infrastructure may not be able to cope with it. Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies. By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, at 4:47 PM ET On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted? A lot, it turns out. According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren't just visiting--they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers' bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users. It's not just Canada. Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth, too, and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share--it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which accounts for a mere 8 percent of bandwidth during peak hours. It wasn't long ago that pundits wondered if the movie industry would be sunk by the same problems that submarined the music industry a decade ago--would we all turn away from legal content in favor of downloading pirated movies and TV shows? Three or four years ago, as BitTorrent traffic surged, that seemed likely. Today, though, Netflix is far bigger than BitTorrent, and it seems sure to keep growing. Sandvine has been publishing annual reports on broadband usage since 2002. When you study previous editions, you notice that Netflix's dominance over BitTorrent fits into a larger story about how our Internet use is changing. Over time, we've shifted away from "asynchronous" applications toward "real-time" apps. Every year, that is, we're using more of our bandwidth to download stuff we need right now, and less for stuff we need later. Sandvine's 2008 report (PDF) showed that all the applications that saw big increases in traffic were dependent on real-time access: online gaming, Internet telephone programs like Skype, instant messaging, Web video, and "placeshifting" devices like Slingbox that let you watch TV shows you record on the Internet. Peer-to-peer file-sharing is asynchronous; you spend hours downloading a movie or game that you'll watch or play later. In Sandvine's 2008 report, peer-to-peer use was essentially unchanged from the previous year. By 2009, peer-to-peer traffic had declined by 25 percent (PDF). That makes sense--once we come to expect immediate access to videos, BitTorrent's download-now, watch-later model seems outdated. That's what happened for me. In a column last spring, I admitted my affection for illegally downloading movies and TV using BitTorrent. I had what I thought was a good excuse for going over to the dark side--there wasn't a good way to get movies and TV shows legally online. Yes, Netflix offered a streaming service called Watch Instantly, but I wrote that the company's streaming service "often feels like Settle-For Instantly, since many of the titles are of the airline-movie variety." In the last 18 months, though, Netflix has gotten much better in two main ways. First, it signed deals with TV networks and movie distributors that let it add a lot more movies and shows. It certainly doesn't have everything--or even most things--that I want, but I rarely feel like I'm wasting my time watching garbage. Second, Netflix's streaming service is now available on a wide range of devices--you can watch with your computer, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Blu-ray and DVD players, Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox, and a range of Web-connected TVs. This is one of my favorite things about Netflix: I can start a movie on my TV, watch a bit of it later on my PC, and then finish it on my iPad before bed. Every time I switch to a new device, the video starts right where I left off. No other movie-delivery system--not DVDs, not BitTorrent, not iTunes, not Hulu--allow for this kind of flexibility. And as long as Netflix keeps expanding its library and the number of devices you can get it on, I don't see how it can lose. Well, maybe there is one dark cloud: Will there be enough available bandwidth for Netflix to keep growing? Wired.com's Ryan Singel points out that in the hours when Netflix hits 20 percent of broadband use, it's being used by just under 2 percent of Netflix subscribers. That stat has huge implications for how ISPs manage their lines. If 2 percent of Netflix customers account for one-fifth of the traffic on North American broadband lines, what will happen when more and more Netflixers begin to watch movies during peak times?* The outcome might actually not be that dire. Theoretically, broadband capacity isn't fixed--as people begin using bandwidth-hogging services like Netflix more often, they'll subscribe to faster Internet lines, and that will push ISPs to build out their capacity. Still, as I've pointed out in the past, American broadband is pretty crummy. Unlike in other countries, our Internet plans haven't been getting faster, cheaper, and more widespread. In a presentation that it published online earlier this year, Netflix predicted that its shipments of DVDs would peak in 2013--after that, the number of discs it sends out will begin to decline. The future of Netflix, then, is the Internet. It's an open question whether the Internet can keep up. |