Dish Network: A Review of Satellite History
Dish Network is one of the larger providers of satellite television service in the United States today. Dish Network presently boosts over 10,000,000 households as customers at this time. Dish Network is on the heirs to the satellite industry that really began developing a generation ago.
Satellites are used for voice, data, and TV communications worldwide. Signals are beamed from the “uplink” sites to the satellites which then beam the signal back down over a target area or “footprint” such as the US, Canada, or other parts of the world. Programming can be received only within the footprint, or a little outside the footprint sometimes with a larger dish.
Most network and cable programs are transmitted on a series of C-band satellites and some Ku-band satellites. These two types of satellites use different frequencies much like VHF and UHF broadcast TV use different frequencies.
Communications satellites were originally designed for commercial purposes for sending telephone, radio, TV, and other signals across the country and around the world for re-transmission to businesses and homes by local telephone companies, TV stations, or cable companies.
Enterprising individuals soon learned to build satellite dish receivers to pick up these signals at their own home, and begin making and selling these systems to homeowners around the country, thus beginning the era of home satellite TV. During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, several million of these C-band systems were sold with dishes generally around the 10′ diameter size. One of the early pioneers in the C-band business was Charlie Ergan who founded Echosphere Corporation.
As home satellite systems became more popular, programmers such as HBO and others realized that they could not continue to give away their programs free to millions of home dish owners. A scrambling system was then developed so their signals were no longer broadcast “in the clear” for everyone with a dish to pick up without any payment to the program developers. The descramblers were addressable, so that the programmer could turn channels on and off by a code sent over the satellite signal, depending on what was paid for by the owner.
A few channels were broadcast on the higher frequency Ku-band satellites, and some hybrid C/Ku-band systems were sold, but Ku reception never became very popular due to the difficulties in receiving the Ku channels and to the lack of sufficient programming on these satellites.
In the early 1990’s four large cable companies launched a Direct Broadcast Satellite, or DBS system called Primestar using an existing medium power Ku-band satellite and a 36″ dish. In 1994, the GM Hughes DIRECTV system was launched using a newly designed high power Ku-band satellite and an 18″ dish. These systems provided great pictures and stereo sound on 150-200 video and audio channels, and the small dish era began in a serious way.
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