DirecTV Plans 1500 HiDef Channels by End of 2007

doormat writes "DirecTV plans on launching four Ka-band satellites by 2007. This means local HiDef channels over satellite for the biggest markets by the end of 2005, with room for 500 HD channels. Plus 1000 more HD local channels and 150 national HD channels by the end of 2007. Thats a total bandwidth of 34Gbit/s, which is about 10 times the bandwidth they currently have in the Ku band (the band they use now for direct-to-home TV service). The bandwidth crunch for satellite providers is over, and the Ka band is the answer."

Rain Fade

[composer777]

I hope they've figured out how to adequately solve the problem of rain fade on the Ka Band. From what little I understand of satellite transmission, rain fade is an even bigger problem on the Ka Band than it is on the current Ku Band that Directv uses. It's not a problem at all on the C Band (big dish) satellites. Do they plan on getting around this by using more power? Or, do they think that more rain fade is an acceptable trade-off for the extra bandwidth?

1500 channels and nothing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

1500 channels sounds good, but what are they going to do for content? If the crap airing now is any indication, there's going to be a lot of dead air in 2007. Maybe they can use the equipment for satellite internet.

DirecTV will compress the hell out of them

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Even today DirecTV is compressing their HD signals to fit more channels in the same bandwidth. They OUGHT to be maxing out the 19.8Mbps that ATSC allocates because for some scenes, 19.8Mbps isn't quite enough to fully resolve high-motion without ugly macro-blocking.

But, HD shows on DirecTV (and a lot of the other satellight providers) are being squished down into 14Mbps or less. It's like they don't get it - HDTV is about the HIGH DEFINITION not the LSTCTV (lots of stupid channels tv). People who pay for high def want the best possible picture quality, not the most possible crappy looking channels.

Leave the crappy picture quality to the standard def channels where people have already given up on ever getting it look good again (once upon a tv, early in the mini-dish era, the standard-def channels had so much bandwidth available that they often looked at least as good as DVD and lots of times they would even look better, but it hasn't been like that for years).

But classic syndicated shows aren't in HD, so....

[Dzimas]

Wow. 1700 channels. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from changing the channel! The only problem is that there are relatively few good shows on at any one time, and none old the "classics" are HD. So the fancy 16:9 GasChromatographBlueLED flat-panel is going serve up 800+ channels of crummy-looking 4:3 interlaced NTSC or PAL "classics" like Mork & Mindy.

I hope there’s not a market for these new cha

[AssProphet]

Consider the cost involved in production of programming for television channels, and then add the cost of businesses paying for the marketing to pay for that programming. Now add all the people who are watching television because there is "nothing better to do."

It just saddens me to see such an investment in entertainment. Especially since entertainment doesn't have any kind of economic return for the individual. I'll agree that entertainment is necessary for humans to enjoy life, but 1500 channels is beyond excessive.

Re:1500 channels and STILL nothing on...

[ac3boy]

It will not be 1500 channels for everyone. By law DirecTV and Dish and every other SAT provider have to provide all the locals to all the folks. Meaning if they offer locals to Atlanta then they have to offer all the locals to every other city they beam too. So this means they have to carry even the crap networks that are available via an antenna. 1500 channels quickly pair down to 5-10 locals for each city they provide locals too. This is one reason they created the spot beam tech. They can use the same transponder to beam Atlanta locals to Atlanta and refocus a new feed to Alabama cities. This is a crude explanation but I am drunk right now and am to tired to explain further. Cheers, John.

All the channels and only commercials to watch

[Malc]

Who cares how many channels it can support? Those are just marketing gimics. I have 70 channels on basic cable and I can flip through them all and find only crap or commercials. TV was better back in the UK with just four channels. There was either really good stuff on, or it didn't take long to discover cricket and horse racing only. More channels != better TV. More channels == dilution and lower quality.

Re:Playboy in Hi-Def......

[CityZen]

Wonder if it will be porn that drives new real-time image processing technologies:

- automatic zit removal
- wrinkle reducer
- cellulite softener
- razor burn & stubble removal
- etc.

Piltdown Man

[Graymalkin]

I can think of a great use of 1500 high definition channels: video on demand (almost). As it stands services like TiVo are trying to take the traditonal watch-when-we-broadcast-or-else model used by television broadcasters and turn it into a watch-whenever-you'd-like model. This has proven to be very popular because there's plenty of people that honestly dislike having to sit down at particular times and watch a television show they like. If you love Adult Swim but have to be up at 7:00am you can tell TiVo to record it so you can watch it that evening when you get home.

This model is limited to offering what broadcasters want to air on their particular channel allotment. This stems from the fact they've only got a finite amount of bandwidth available. With a huge amount of bandwidth available DirecTV could really shake up the traditional broadcast model.

Instead of leasing channels to broadcasters DirecTV could instead sell bandwidth to content distributors. Say you wanted to watch a particular episode of the Sopranos. You'd tell your DirecTV DVR what episode you'd like to watch and it would consult a big broadcast content index. It'd find that episode 6 of the Sopranos would be downlinked from 6:45am to 7:45am on channel 751 on Monday. At 6:45am on Monday it would tune to channel 751 and record episode 6 of the Sopranos. You've now got an HD copy of the Sopranos, episode 6, on your DVR that you could watch whenever you wanted.

Instead of leasing a whole channel for HBO to use they could simply sell HBO a bandwidth alotment. HBO could then broadcast an entire season of the Sopranos on whatever channel and whatever hour they wished. Subscribers could pick and choose which episodes they wanted to watch out of those and have their DVR record them. Channel 751 later that day might be downlinking Gilligan's Island episodes for all HBO cares, they're only concerned with the bandwidth they paid for to distribute the Sopranos that week.

Any given week this proposed set of satellites could beam an obscene amount of data down to recievers. I think assigning such bandwidth to a rigid set of virtual "channels" would be a bit ridiculous. We're in the age of smart peripheral devices, televisions are no longer simply dumb boxes that convert radio signals to color pictures. Digital recievers can parse through a large amount of data to find specific things a person is looking for. There's enough computing power in my iPod to search through thousands of songs and pick out particular ones based on my criteria so it can't be terribly difficult to apply this idea to digital satellite broadcasts. Instead of looking through a miniature hard drive the system instead scans thousands of data streams.

I'm sure they'll continue to overcompress HD

[sdo1]

I have DirecTV HD. Part of the HD package allows me to get the HD feed of CBS from New York. I also get HD from my local CBS affiliate via over-the-air (OTA) antenna.

There is quite a difference in quality. Make no mistake, they both look great, but the signal over DirecTV is far more compressed. There's more compression artifacts, less detail, and a generally softer picture.

It's great that DirecTV is taking the lead in HD... and this will only accelerate my desire to pick up a DirecTV-HD-TiVo... but I hope they take quality very seriously rather than just trying to stuff as many HD channels in their bandwidth as possible, damn the consequences.

-S