Important Sony Satellite Receivers Information

Africa

South African-based Multichoice's DStv is the main digital satellite television provider in sub-Saharan Africa, broadcasting principally in English, but also in Portuguese, German and Afrikaans. Canal Horizons, owned by France's Canal+, is the main provider in French-speaking Africa. Another entrant into the satellite television circuit in Africa is MyTvAfrica, a subsidiary of Dubai based Strong Technologies. Satellite television has been far more successful in Africa than cable, primarily because the infrastructure for cable television does not exist and would be expensive to install since majority of Africans cannot afford paid cable television. Furthermore, maintaining a cable network is expensive due to the need to cover larger and more sparsely populated areas though there are some terrestrial pay-TV and MMDS services.

The launch of Free2view has made satellite TV available to the masses in Africa. Free2view currently broadcasts MSNBC as its exclusive news channel and is about to roll out additional channels.

GTV, a British-based company, has become the second in sub-saharan Africa providing digital satellite television with the focus first on Kenya Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Congo ETC.

Nigeria

Traditionally DStv had held a monopoly over Nigeria's Satellite television sector but three new companies, HiTVmytv and trend tv are starting to compete in this sector.

Sudan

Sudan TV, the government-owned national network, is available by satellite as well as broadcast.

The Americas

Canada

In Canada, the two legal DBS services available are Bell TV and Star Choice. The CRTC has refused to license American satellite services, but nonetheless hundreds of thousands (up to a million by some estimates) of Canadians access or have accessed American services — usually these services have to be billed to an American address and are paid for in U.S. dollars, although some viewers receive American signals through pirate decryption. Whether such activity is grey market or black market is the source of often heated debate between those who would like greater choice and those who argue that the protection of Canadian firms and Canadian culture is more important.

In October 2004, Quebec judge Danièle Côté ruled Canada's Radiocommunication Act to be in direct violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, insofar as it bans reception of unlicensed foreign television services. The judgment gave the federal government a one-year deadline to remedy this breach of the Constitution. However, this contradicts prior Supreme Court of Canada decisions and, at last word in late 2004, was expected to be appealed.

In addition, Canadian satellite providers continue to be plagued by the unquestionably black market devices which "pirate" or "steal" their signals as well as by a number of otherwise completely lawful devices which can be reprogrammed to receive pirate TV.

One cable TV CEO (Karl Péladeau of Québecor, which owns Vidéotron) is on public record as demanding conditions be placed on the CRTC license issued to Bell TV, due to Bell TV’s reputation for vastly inferior security compared to its cable rivals and Shaw Cable–owned Star Choice.

Although there are no official statistics, the use of American satellite services in Canada appears to be declining as of 2004.

Some would claim that this is probably due to a combination of increasingly aggressive police enforcement and an unfavourable exchange rate between the Canadian and U.S. currencies. As the U.S. dollar has been declining as of 2005 versus other international currencies, the decline in DirecTV viewership in Canada may well be related not to a cost difference as much as to the series of smart card swaps which have rendered the first three generations of DirecTV access cards (F, H and HU) all obsolete.

Latin America

Latin America’s main satellite system are SKY Latin America, which has approximately 1.4 million subscribers in each of Brazil and Mexico and DirecTV Latin America, which provides service to the rest of the Americas, with a total of approximately 1.3 million subscribers. Pay-TV is not popular among Latin Americans because fees are expensive in PPP terms.

The service offered in Brazil includes Digital TV with full Dolby Digital surround support, mts and multiple subtitle options, a first for the Brazilian market. A recent update to Sky's services in Brazil is Sky+ which allows the customer to record a program while watching another one, this service is however very expensive resulting in very few clients subscribing to this add-on.

United States

Currently, there are two primary satellite television providers of subscription based service available to United States consumers: Dish Network and DirecTV.

Over the past three decades, various U.S. satellite services have come and gone or combined to form the current primary services. In 1975 RCA created Satcom 1, the first satellite built especially for use by the then three national television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC). Later that same year, HBO leased a transponder on Satcom 1 and began transmission of television programs via satellite to cable systems. Owners of cable systems paid $10,000 to install 3-meter dishes to receive TV signal in C-band. In 1976 Taylor Howard built an amateur system, which consisted of a converted military surplus radar dish and a satellite receiver designed and built by Howard, for home satellite reception. Taylor's system could be used for receiving TV programs both from American and Soviet communication satellites. In 1977 Pat Robertson launched the first satellite-delivered basic cable service called the CBN Cable Network. In 1979, the Satellite Home Viewers Act allowed homeowners in the US to own and operate their own home satellite system, consisting of C-band equipment from a multitude of manufacturers who were making parts for systems such as Taylor Howard's, and began a large controversy of which channels could be received by whom.

USSB was a direct-to-home service founded in 1981. In the early 1990s they partnered with Hughes and continued operation until purchased in 1998 by DirecTV.

In 1991 Primestar launched as the first North American DBS service. Hughes’s DirecTV, the first national high-powered upper K _u -band DBS system, went online in 1994. The DirecTV system became the new delivery vehicle for USSB. News Corporation currently holds a 38% stake, which it is in the process of selling to Liberty Media. In 1996, EchoStar’s Dish Network went online in the United States and has gone on to similar success as DirecTV’s primary competitor. The AlphaStar service launched in 1996 and went into bankruptcy in 1997. Dominion Video Satellite Inc's Sky Angel also went online in the United States in 1996 with its DBS service geared towards "faith and family". Primestar sold its assets to Hughes in 1999 and switched from DBS to an IPTV platform.

In 2004, Cablevision’s Voom service went online, specifically catering to the emerging market of HDTV owners and aficionados, but folded in April 2005. The service’s “exclusive” high-definition channels were migrated to the Dish Network system. Commercial DBS services are the primary competition to cable television service, although the two types of service have significantly different regulatory requirements (for example, cable television has public access requirements, and the two types of distribution have different regulations regarding carriage of local stations).

The majority of ethnic-language broadcasts in North America are carried on K _u band free-to-air. The largest concentration of ethnic programming is on Galaxy 25 at 97° W. Pittsburgh International Telecommunications and GlobeCast World TV offers a mix of free and pay-TV ethnic channels in the internationally-standard DVB-S format, as do others. Home2US Communications Inc. also offers several ethnic channels on AMC-4 at 101° W, as well as other free and pay-TV channels. Several U.S.-English language network affiliates (representing CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, FOX, the CW (formerly the WB and UPN), ION Network and MyNetworkTV) are available as free-to-air broadcasts, as are the three U.S.-Spanish language networks (Univisión, Telefutura and Telemundo). The number of free-to-air specialty channels is otherwise rather limited. Specific FTA offerings tend to appear and disappear rather often and typically with little or no notice, although sites such as LyngSat do track the changing availability of both free and pay channels worldwide.

Asia

Bangladesh

There are several satellite providers in Bangladesh. The main ones are listed below:

1. Bangla Vision
2. NTV
3. RTV
4. ATN Bangla
5. Channel I
6. Channel 1
7. KASTURI
8. DD
9. Boishaki TV
10. ETV
11. DESH TV
12. Diganta Television
13. Islamic TV
14. STVUS

India

In India there are more than 300 TV Channels are operating. India has the indigenously built INSAT series satellites from ] (ISRO) along wi