17 YEARS OF GENEROUS PUBLICATIONS
Inside view to the occupants of the houses. Some of the houses do not have dishes but specialized antennas for receiving signals from the base stations of their service providers. Prior to this era of proliferation and competitiveness among satellite TV service providers, the cost of providing decoder, dish and other accessories needed for transmitting to home TV sets was not less than $600 whereas the monthly subscription was about $100 . This cost can only be afforded by high income level persons. It could be stated that the trend has reverted and spending as low as $50 during promotion periods can be able to afford a satellite TV connection whereas about $12 can be spent on monthly subscription. This development has made information to be at the reach of the folks with low income levels in the developing world. Since many providers are striving for mastery in the business world, they have introduced many innovations aimed at having edge over their competitors. These innovations which includes watching the TV programs on the mobile phone everywhere you go, codes for controlling channels to ensure children are not endangered, recording services to ensure that telecasted programs can be stored and watched at convenience etc. have placed some providers at advantage over others and left customers the choice to migrate through providers at will. The introduction of software to surf thousands of satellite TV stations over the internet with the computer at no service charge by some programmers have gone a long way to liberalize their services hence, making the customer to be at freedom to decide how and when to use the service. Since the internet facility is not domicile in any country, the satellite TV services can now be view by customers at no service charge from around the world with internet facility. This has made information dissemination easy hence emancipation of the poor and mediocre from ignorance is imminent. I believe that as technology continues to be dynamic, satellite TV service competitiveness will continue and the level of knowledge dissemination will increase. This will make it possible to achieve the UN millennium development goals among developing nations of the world. In the last ten years, diversity in content SEPTEMBER
offering was key for growth in the satellite pay-TV sector. Overall, more than 1,000 channels had been added by satellite TV platforms worldwide between 2000 and 2007, with the number of channels reaching over 12,000. Even excluding the broadcast of local networks in the US, the figure still stands at close to 9,000 channels. On average, the number of channels offered per platform has increased from 77 to 100 in the last seven years. In order to further increase subscriptions, both historical and emerging platforms are expected to keep adding new channels with a potential focus on HD for certain historical platforms and on new standard definition channels for emerging platforms. Digital video recording solutions, already introduced by leading satellite TV platforms, will soon become a standard offering worldwide. Currently, 22 out of the 92 platforms in service are offering DVR premium services compared to seven platforms in 2004.
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The Highly Circulated Satellite Magazine
2010