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What IS TRUE FTA?
You'll be amazed at all of the channels as new channels are added each month.
Plus all the networks are there.

We are at the beginning edge of a new technological revolution. It’s called, “Free To Air” DVB Television. It won’t be long and there will be little dishes on the roof of every home and looking out the window or on the deck of condo’s and apartments. At the present time the entire system to pick up this new revolution only costs $200.00.

Once you put up the dish and hook-up the system there is no further monthly charge. Too good to be true? No, and here’s why this new industry of “Free To Air” TV and Stereo Radio via satellite will boom.

Let’s start at the technical background but we’ll keep this simple. Cable TV was first “discovered” when it was called, “Community Antenna TV.” Depending on where you lived, you may have seen it spring up in the 1960’s or later. The plan worked like this. People in towns that were far away from a metropolitan center, or who lived on “the wrong side of the mountain” wanted to see TV. So, local companies put up a series of TV antennas as high up in the air as possible to get distant signals as clear as possible. These signals were then combined into a coax cable and fed to the local homes and apartments. A charge was made for this and people gladly paid to the local cable company in order to see TV. The few folks out at the edge of town where the cable did not run had an antenna up on a tall tower with an antenna rotor and booster amplifier. Often such “rigs” cost upwards of $1,000.00 to get TV as good as possible from stations 50 to 100 miles away.

Back at the end of the 1970’s a few “smart cookies” realized that there were satellites overhead with excess capacity. They made deals with the owners and put a giant dish at their studio and beamed the signal up to the “bird.” Then cable companies put in a dish and took the signals down and mixed them with local “off-air” signals for a cable bundle. Soon local channels were also added for local news, weather, schools, etc. The earliest satellite operators were WGN-TV channel 9, Chicago, WTCG Channel 17, Atlanta, and several religious broadcasters that included The 700 Club, PTL Network, and others. Soon CNN started up and the satellite-to-local-cable industry was born. Local cable systems typically could bundle up 13 channels in the early days and had room for about 7 or so “out of town channels.” One of the first to go “PAY TV” was Home Box Office, known as HBO and then the others who soon followed.

Soon the skies became crowded with newcomers and the satellites filled up and more were launched. Then a funny thing happened; Cable systems were getting full and had to go to new technology to allow more channels to be piped to the homes. The little black box on top of the TV set soon appeared across the USA. And then the bottom fell out.

Satellites have a limited lifespan and when the “old birds” were replaced, the cost of having a channel on them increased by double almost each time the satellite was replaced. People who paid $10,000.00 a month for channels in the early days are paying $120,000.00 monthly today. Such fees soon separate the “losers from the winners.” And then a new system called Digital Pulse Code Modulation for audio and later called MPEG hit the USA like “a bat across the eyebrows.” Kaboom, this new technology shook the technological nation and soon came into our homes. What was it?

First we saw it appear as Compact Disc’s, or CD’s. Wonderful stereo sound was put on a little plastic disc that would last many lifetimes and had crystal clear audio. That technology was begun in the early 1960’s and was known as the “Reed-Solomon” codes which are the basis for encoding and reading CD’s. In 1977, Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Sony demonstrated compact discs and players at the Tokyo Audio Fair. Soon, CD’s went on to prosper for audio and video was next. In 1978 Phillips introduced the first Video Disc Player that had about 9 inch diameter discs that played audio and video. It was a flop for many reasons but a new industry was launched. This was made possible from the labors of the MPEG organization which stands for: Moving Picture Coding Experts Group that was a group of electronic and mathematical wizards that came up with systems for converting standard audio and video to compressed digital which is now known as MPEG-2, MPEG-3, and so on.

Back to the satellites, two companies wanted to bring a bundle of signals to rural homes just like a good big-city cable system but without the wires. Two companies survived this new “roll out” and they are DISH NETWORK and DIREC-TV. They take one satellite and using compressed video they put many signals on one channel of the “bird” thus saving lots of money. To make this more efficient they had to go to a small dish which meant a higher satellite frequency known as Ku Band.

Then, Rod Wheeler was bored to tears in his cabin at Whitehorse, Yukon in Canadian territory. Rod was one of the first to build a low-cost home satellite dish in 1980 and from there his company which began on a shoestring was called, “Northern Satellite Systems” and later just shortened down to NORSAT. Rod and his group of Guru’s settled on the idea of using compressed video and audio the put more signals on existing satellites to launch a Direct-To-Home service. Soon this system prospered in Canada.

In short, a little dish is put up on the roof or wherever it can see the satellites. The satellite channels are cut-up into little “space-segments” by using compressed video and audio so that the cost of uplinking and satellite transmission is minimal. That means that every local TV station can now put their signal up on the “bird” and cover North America instead of just their local market. Networks can spring up from Garage’s and low budgets and cover Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, the 48 States, Mexico and the Caribbean all for a low cost. The system is known as “Free To Air” (FTA) as there is no monthly cost and the signals are not scrambled. So far there are about 1,700 broadcasters world-wide using this system and about 200 already serving North America. That’s why the FTA systems are so cheap already.