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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 M 26 EUROMEDIA 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