What is Satellite TV?

Satellite TV simply means that television signals are beamed to our televisions via a big white dish-shaped received, the bigger your dish, the more channels you can have, well, that’s how it used to be anyway. These days everything’s getting smaller, cell phones, lap tops, satellite dish receivers and chocolate bars – they think we haven’t noticed you know! Anyway, back to satellite TV, it’s really clever and quite “beam me up Scottie”, you see, the signals are sent out to space, to a communications satellite which is in a fixed orbit around the earth (more like Dr Evil then?), then they are scrambled electronically, otherwise everybody could download the signals illegally and the satellite television companies would soon go out of business. All you have to do for these signals to be unscrambled and sent to your television set, is to pay a subscription to your satellite TV company for a dish to receive the signals and a de-scrambler to make sure that your TV set can read them. The more channels you want, the more you pay, or at least that’s how it used to be. These days there are some free view channels available, you just need to shop around a bit.

Benefits of Satellite TV

Satellite TV is much more efficient than earlier methods of television broadcasting, when you needed an aerial antenna on your roof, or on the top of your portable TV, do you remember those days? How about making one person stand on a chair in a corner of the room holding the aerial in just the right position for your TV to receive a good picture, even if it meant that the poor person got a tired arm and couldn’t even see the TV. Those were the days. Anyway, satellite TV really has made a big difference. It’s even better than cable, it’s no longer necessary to dig trenches and lay miles and miles of wires and cables, the signal is simply beamed to your satellite dish, unscrambled and in your TV before you can say “24 hours”.

Satellite TV has made a really big difference to many people who live in remote areas where the reception is poor or they don’t have a cable service, however, the satellite dish must be positioned to have a clear line of sight towards the satellite to get a good picture. This can be a problem for people who live on the wrong side of the mountain or buried deep within a dark forest of trees. There can also be trouble if there is heavy rain or cloud cover, for example, which is interrupting the signal. That can be really frustrating (speaking from experience), after all, it’s during heavy thunderstorms and torrential rain that you want to curl up in front of the television isn’t it, not when the sun is shining and the sky is blue . . .

Many people who find themselves, for one reason or another, living at the other side of the world from their country of origin can have the opportunity to watch all of their favorite TV channels from home – clever isn’t it?

Now you can watch HBO on your iPad