Basic HTML Version
■
■
■
■
158
TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 09-10/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
In both cases, TV stations do not
want any unwelcome viewers for their
feeds, because they only want the final
product to reach households, including
commercial breaks. This is why trans-
missions between studios or TV sta-
tions frequently use fibre optic cables
to make sure only the two transmission
partners can access material.
Luckily for satellite DXers, in today’s
world a cable cannot always be used, for
example if the distance is too large or if
no cable is available on site to send a
live report to station headquarters. In
these cases, satellites have to be used
for feeds.
Of course all sorts of technical tricks
are used to limit the number of onlook-
ers and the following account lists major
strategies TV stations rely on:
Encryption
This is the most effective protec-
tion against unwanted viewers and for
studio-to-studio transmissions this in
most cases does not pose a challenge
from a technical point of view. With out-
side broadcast (OB) vans it’s a different
story altogether.
While most OB vans are equipped
with encryption hardware, time is of the
essence in live reports so that setting
up the required encryption is frequently
not possible as it takes some time until
all parameters are set and checked.
Generally, feed transmissions fall back
on directly addressable encryption sys-
tems such as PowerVu or BISS. The
latter, in particular, is protected by a
password that is defined by the TV sta-
tion.
Even if you try as hard as you can with
the help of BruteForce luck will probably
not be on your side in finding the correct
password during the short time most
feeds last. After all, the BISS password
consists of 16 hexadecimal digits.
Counting down to the beginning of a feed transmission
MPEG 4:2:2 feed from the German parliament. A standard receiver would not be able to process
this signal. With a PC and appropriate software the signal turns into nice video on the PC monitor.
Fashion TV on ABS1 75° East with an FEC of 7/8.
List of today’s feed transmissions