Hello, i heard rumours of the future of fta is only a couple of years, and that is it.
once ATT has bought completely dish network, and another company gets directv, they are all going to fiber optics, and getting rid of satellite tv. is this true?
someone that lives out in the boonies, will not have access to directv or dish network, only the big c-band satellites and ku-band satellites.
just a rumour i have heard from fta installers here.
- DN and DTV as well as many other services are all in Ku band which is small dish 12GHz this won't go away for many decades to come.
- Fiber optic is a great threat for satellites but will never eliminate it . Infact KU band Satellites will always be a constant companion to any broadcast services thru out the century. Free to Air will always be around.
- PTA maybe eliminated on DN and BEV within few weeks but will pup up on other Satellite service provider. This will be constant cat and mouse chase.
C&P from "The King" : All providers broadcast standard defintion 4:3 as MPEG-2 for Video and AC3 for Audio both A/V industry standards even for DVD players and DVD discs that we all use. But DTV predates these standards they use a similar encoding modulation. They use QPSK instead of MPEG-2. Both encoding schemes use almost 50:1. This is an area that I know very well because I do this for a living.
Example: Let say a hockey game of about 2 hours video taped on a digital format like DVcam if they broadcast it as is it will take about 30GB of digital video broadcast DVB. Where as if you encode to MPEG-2 & AC3 it will be down to 3G byte 10:1. Also encoding frame by frame requires compression in Mega pixels per frame similar to your digital photo camera 5MP or 6MP. Now that it is encoded you need to decode it back so you need a decoder.
No Manufacturer that makes generic decoders like to bother with equipment that receives only QPSK the current encoding modulation for DTV instead of MPEG-2 and AC3 the current industry standards for SD by all providers. But this doesn't mean they are safe forever may be for SD 4:3 standard broadcast. But for MPEG-4 HD is another ball game??? All providers today use MPEG-4 for HD
Any dish can point to their SATs 110 or 119 etc. But 2 primary things you must have - Decoder that can decode QPSK - Keys for their conditional access (DSS Videoguard)
Therefore there is a lot more to see in HDTV for future FTA No electronics code that can't be broken. It will be broken.
My response was in regard to the first sentence in this thread: "Hello, i heard rumours of the future of fta is only a couple of years, and that is it" My C&P reiforces the thought of a perpetual FTA in some form. ei. HDTV or DTV in this case.
