Satellite Tv Service

The first direct broadcast satellite (DBS) company was formed by four cable companies trying to meet the Congressional mandates for expanding the cable systems outside of cities and larger towns. Rather than spending money installing lots of hard to maintain cables to these outlying areas these cable operators formed Primestar. This company put small dishes in yards and on rooftops throughout rural America to bring cable television decoder boxes and programming to these underserved areas. Primestar was born in 1990 followed in 1994 by Direct TV.

It was not until early 1996, after the December 28th, 1995 launch of EchoStarI, that the first DBS company that had a background in satellite TV systems, Dish Network, went on the air. The parent company, EchoStar Communications Corp, had been formed in 1980 to sell C Band television systems. While the privately owned C Band systems stopped being a growing market when HBO started to encrypt their signal, the owners of EchoStar, Charles W. Ergen, his wife Cantey, and James DeFrance, continued to develop the necessary technology to bring high quality DBS to customers. In 1986 the company filed for a DBS broadcast license which was approved in 1992, but it wasn't until 1995 that they could get their first satellite launched, from China.

EchoStarI was launched into geosynchronous orbit over 119° W longitude. This gave the system coverage in all 50 states (including Hawaii and Alaska), and Puerto Rico. This satellite gave the company up to 300 channels of television and music to broadcast to its customers. In 1999, after acquiring the assets of a failed competitor (28 transponders on a satellite at 110° W), Dish Television expanded their capabilities to 500 channels. Rather than require customers to install 2 antennas to receive the signals from the two satellites, Dish Network developed the Dish 500 Antenna with a unique dual LNB design. With the launch of EchoStarX in 2006 into this same 110°W orbital location, the Dish 500 antenna gives the Dish customers the capability to receive up to 1000 channels.

Further enhancements to the antenna system have led to the Dish 500+ antenna that, while still receiving the DSB broadcasts from the 110°W and 119°W satellites, is also able to receive signals from lower strength, non-DBS satellite broadcasts on FSS band from satellites at 105°W, 118.5°W and 121°W orbital locations. Dish Television is the only satellite provider that can do this.

Dish Network has been using the MPEG-2 (Moving Pictures Expert Group, a set of standards for digitally encoding audio-visual information) standard for years in its broadcasts. The move to High Definition television, with its increased bandwidth requirements, is forcing them to broadcast their HD signals in the MPEG-4 standard. While they are currently maintaining the MPEG-2 standard for non-HD channels, the intention is to move to the MPEG-4 standard for all channels. The increased compression for non-HD channels will allow even more channels on the Dish500 system.

While advanced technology has always been a hallmark of the Dish Television service, there has also been a hardnosed business plan to keep costs down. The largest portion of the operations budget for any DBS company is the cost of programming that they buy, and the management team has pushed hard to keep those costs in line. When a provider tries to increase their prices too much, Dish Network takes a hard line and removes that channel from their lineup. With their 13+ million subscribers (2006) the various networks that have faced this ultimate sanction have usually come back to the bargaining table. Most of the stations removed for price increases have been back on the Dish Network within a month.

Dish Television continues to innovate and keep their prices in line. New channels, new services, new technologies allow this company to stay ahead of the competition.