unitron_unitron 21/05/2015 18:31 Page 1
Satellite pay-TV Growth
Experts at Unitron
Group explain how the
company is leading the
global transition of
satellite ODU Products
from analogue to digital.
ajor trends in the satellite
market, coupled with
advancements made by
leading Integrated Circuit (IC)
solution providers are driving a global
transition from Analogue to Digital
products, making 2015 an exciting
year for the Direct Broadcast Satellite
(DBS) Outdoor Unit (ODU) market.
The satellite market is expected to
continue as the largest broadcast market
over Cable, and IPTV, with
nearly 500m households in
2017, according to IHS.
With 4% CAGR between
2012 and 2017, the pay-TV
satellite sector is well
positioned to expand in its
leadership role. Being the
leader is not without
challenges, as both the
Cable and IPTV markets are
fighting to gain market
share. New features such as
‘second screen’ apps, enhanced Digital Video
Recorder (DVR), and a transition toward
server/client in-home architectures are
expected to increase in deployments over the
coming years. According to Infonetics, the
top three business drivers for delivering
Multiscreen Services are: ability to improve
customer loyalty and reduce churn,
consumer demand to view content across
multiple devices, and to address the
competitive threat from other pay-TV
providers and OTT services such as Netflix,
Amazon, Hulu, Apple and others.
The ability to support Multiscreen
Services requires changes to the Set Top Box
(STB) technology and architecture. STBs are
increasing the number of video streams, or
demodulators, it can support and the
traditional one video stream per STB is
quickly shrinking in favour of boxes that
support >2 streams. This transition is driven
not only to support Multiscreen Services but
also to allow for lowering of the total
Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC). A larger
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single STB (sometimes called a Server,
Gateway, or Media Centre box) with the
capability to support multiple video
decode/transcode streams is cheaper than
having a distributed video stream network
with each viewing location having its own
video decoding capability. Media Centre
devices are used to record and store content
at a single location and then send to low cost
Client STBs via Video Networking solutions,
such as Multimedia over Coax Alliance
(MoCA), Power-Line Communication (PLC),
HomePNA or even Wi-Fi. This architecture
is commonly referred to as Server/Client
topology. According to IHS both the Satellite
single tuner STB and Dual Tuner STB, or
DVR, shipments will experience negative
CAGR between 2012 and 2017 while >2
tuners STB shipments grow at nearly a 33%
CAGR over the same period.
Satellite Pay-TV Background
For Satellite Operators, it is not a simple
task to add additional video stream support
within a home. Pay-TV Satellite Operators
use satellites placed in Geostationary Orbit
(GEO) to enable a fixed antenna location on
the home. At a distance of 35,786 kilometres
(22,236 miles) above the Earth, this orbit
has the same rotational period as Earth and
thus appears motionless, or fixed, to the
ground antennas on customer roofs. The
ability to have a fixed antenna makes
Satellite broadcast practical and the lowest
cost method per household to supply a video
service. Satellite Operators do not require
additional infrastructure build-out to add a
new subscriber; the video signals are already
available as long as they have a line of sight
to the satellites’ overhead. Cable and Telco
Operators require expensive infrastructure
build-out to pass additional homes, which is
why you seldom see these services in rural
areas where the cost cannot be amortised
across a large number of homes like it can in
an urban area.
Because the signal source has to travel
over 22K miles before reaching the antenna
dish on your house, Satellite Operators are
very concerned about Power. To optimise the
Power of the signal between the satellite and
your dish, modulation schemes are used. A
negative to this scheme is that additional
Bandwidth (BW) is required to support the
same amount of channels as compared to
Cable TV. The benefit to the end consumer is
that video received from a Satellite source
versus a Cable TV source will be of a higher
picture quality – HD looks great over
satellite, and just wait until they
start broadcasting at Ultra HD
or 4KTV resolutions!
To deliver this high quality
service the amount of BW
needed to provide a full range of
content is usually in the 4GHz
or greater range. All of this BW
is broadcast directly from the
GEO orbiting satellite to the
antenna on the customer’s
home. The BW available from
the antenna dish to the STB
inside the home is only 1.2GHz.
To accommodate this transition from a
large input BW to a small output B