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TELE
satellite
TELE-satellite
International
The World’s Largest
Digital TV Trade Magazine
since 1981
Alexander Wiese
Publisher
alex@TELE-satellite.com
HQ in Munich, Germany
Address
TELE-satellite International, PO Box 1234, 85766 Munich-Ufg, GERMANY/EUROPE
Editor-in-Chief
Alexander Wiese, alex@TELE-satellite.com
Published by
TELE-satellite Medien GmbH, Aschheimer Weg 19, 85774 Unterfoehring, GERMANY/EUROPE
Design
Németi Barna Attila
Advertising
Hard Copy Subscription
Copyright
© 2012 by TELE-satellite
ISSN
1435-7003
TELE-satellite was established in 1981 and today is the oldest, largest and most-read digital tv trade
magazine in the world. TELE-satellite is seen by more than 350,000 digital tv professionals around the
world and is available both in printed form and online.
Dear Readers,
More and more receivers operate with an Internet connection
and offer users an enormous assortment of TV channels that are
available via the worldwide Internet. It could be streaming channels
such as with a regular TV broadcaster or video files that would first
need to be downloaded. The choices are becoming more and more
limitless. The selection of the transmission path is actually a way to
limit these choices.
Of all the different technical variants, terrestrial TV transmissions
in most regions offer the least amount of TV channels. A step up
in the number of available channels would be cable TV and even
better would be TV via satellite. But far larger are the number of TV
channels that can be received via the Internet, but there’s no way to
actually confirm how many there really are. All too often one Web/
IP-TV provider starts up service while another stops service making
it difficult to count the number of channels.
If you take a closer look at the TV channels that you can receive
with the different methods, an interesting picture begins to develop.
With terrestrial TV the number of available channels might be small,
but they’d mostly be channels that viewers would want to see. Not
only that, these channels would naturally offer programming of local
interest.
The channels available via cable TV fulfill similar criteria; they are
also mostly channels liked by the viewers attached to the cable
network. The plight of the cable TV viewer, that usually doesn’t have
any other way of receiving TV, is that they are typically exploited by
the cable provider in that they fill up their channel space with far too
many useless channels such as shopping channels.
The satellite viewer has the best selection but they often have to do
without channels that deal with local news and events. The selection
of channels is so large that choosing a channel to watch becomes
a tiresome task. Even more gigantic is the choice with Web/IP-TV;
here there’s absolutely no organization at all.
On what criteria should you base your decision on? The list of
channels that every receiver presents after a scan has become so
long that I easily lose the overview. And that’s the problem: I should
be able to choose a TV channel based on its name alone. But this
is simply not enough information. There are many channels that
have selected very peculiar names. How am I supposed to know,
for example, that Press TV isn’t a journalism channel but rather a
news channel from Iran? And how many Tele5 and TV 5 channels
are there that appear in a channel list after as scan? Which one
should I choose?
As a user I think receivers should provide another bit of information
for each channel that would help me make a decision. And that
would be the picture quality which would be expressed in the bitrate.
Ever since I’ve had an HD television, I’ve wanted to be able to use
it exactly for that purpose, and that is to watch TV channels in high
technical quality. For that reason my current criteria out of all the
channels that are available is to search for only those channels that
carry the two letters ‘HD’. That reduces the choices significantly but
it’s not cut and dry. Quite a few SD channels also broadcast in good
technical quality.
What’s missing for me is an indication of the bitrate for each
channel in the receiver’s channel list. Then I would be able to sort
the channels based on bitrate and would only surf between the first
100 channels. For those TV channels that don’t put any value on the
quality of their picture, I in return wouldn’t put any value on those
channels. Exceptions prove the rule.
So this is my wish for the scan function of a receiver: the bitrate
should also be measured during a scan and sorting based on bitrate
should also be possible. That’s what I’d like to see.
Alexander Wiese
Editor-in-Chief TELE-satellite International
