Satellite TV Programming

Satellite TV providers get programming from two major sources: national turnaround channels (such as HBO, ESPN and CNN) and various local channels (the ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS affiliates in a particular area). Most of the turnaround channels also provide programming for cable TV, and the local channels typically broadcast their programming over the airwaves.
Turnaround channels usually have a distribution center that beams their programming to a geosynchronous satellite. The broadcast center uses large satellite dishes to pick up these analog and digital signals from several sources.
Most local stations don't transmit their programming to satellites, so the provider has to get it another way. If the provider includes local programming in a particular area, it will have a small local facility consisting of a few racks of communications equipment. The equipment receives local signals directly from the broadcaster through fiber-optic cable or an antenna and then transmits them to the central broadcast center.
The broadcast center converts all of this programming into a high-quality, uncompressed digital stream. At this point, the stream contains a vast quantity of data -- about 270 megabits per second (Mbps) for each channel. In order to transmit the signal from there, the broadcast center has to compress it. Otherwise, it would be too big for the satellite to handle. In the next section, we'll find out how the signal is compressed.

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Satellite Receiver

Photo courtesy DirecTV


The end component in the entire satellite TV system is the receiver. The receiver has four essential jobs:
It de-scrambles the encrypted signal. In order to unlock the signal, the receiver needs the proper decoder chip for that programming package. The provider can communicate with the chip, via the satellite signal, to make necessary adjustments to its decoding programs. The provider may occasionally send signals that disrupt illegal de-scramblers as an electronic counter measure (ECM) against illegal users.
It takes the digital MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 signal and converts it into an analog format that a standard television can recognize. In the United States, receivers convert the digital signal to the analog National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) format. Some dish and receiver setups can also output an HDTV signal.
It extracts the individual channels from the larger satellite signal. When you change the channel on the receiver, it sends just the signal for that channel to your TV. Since the receiver spits out only one channel at a time, you can't tape one program and watch another. You also can't watch two different programs on two TVs hooked up to the same receiver. In order to do these things, which are standard on conventional cable, you need to buy an additional receiver.
It keeps track of pay-per-view programs and periodically phones a computer at the provider's headquarters to communicate billing information.
Receivers have a number of other features as well. They pick up a programming schedule signal from the provider and present this information in an onscreen programming guide. Many receivers have parental lock-out options, and some have built-in digital video recorders (DVRs), which let you pause live television or record it on a hard drive.

These receiver features are just added bonuses to the technology of satellite TV. With its movie-quality picture and sound, satellite TV is becoming a popular investment for consumers. Digital cable, which also has improved picture quality and extended channel selection, has proven to be the fiercest competitor to satellite providers. The TV war is raging strong between satellite and digital cable technologies as well as between the providers who offer these services. Once considered luxuries in most households, satellite and digital cable are becoming quite common as providers bundle TV with Internet and phone services to offer competitive deals and win over customers.
For more information on satellite television and other broadcast systems, see the links on the next page.

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Foursquare Closes $50M at a $600M Valuation

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Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen.
The company is raising $50 million, and all of it will go towards building out the company, no secondary sales here. The valuation had been rumored to be as high as $1 billion, but our sources say it settled out at $550 million pre-money, $600 million post.
Part of that is because the round was mostly done by insiders. Leading it was Andreessen Horowitz, still the only major Valley firm invested in the company. Ben Horowitz did the deal and is remaining a board observer only. Union Square Ventures, OATV also reupped in this round and Spark Capital came in as a new investor, but not the lead. Bijan Sabet is joining as a board observer as well. The money will be used to build out the merchant platform, the San Francisco office and fuel international expansion, said founder Dennis Crowley in an interview.
Foursquare’s ten million users are impressive for a mobile app, but small compared to numbers other major social networks. Its revenues are scant. Some firms said they shied away from the deal, because they felt monetization was only more unclear now. With the local space on fire, Foursquare’s target advertisers are already beset with sales people from Yelp, Living Social, Groupon, Google and others calling on them. There’s going to be a level of retailer fatigue, and business-wise Foursquare is late to the party.
Crowley emphasized that Foursquare has a very different value proposition from competitors and is focused on not only rewarding loyal patrons but tracking how their referrals snake through the social graph offering different kinds of rewards to new customers, repeat customers, referred customers and of course the mayors in a way that only Foursquare can. The company is still working on the merchant platform and will get aggressive on selling through direct sales and partnerships once they feel it’s perfect, Crowley said. “We know what it’s going to be, we just haven’t flipped the switch on it yet,” he said.
A $600 million valuation is a big but not unreasonable step-up from Foursquare’s last round which was priced at $120 million. That’s still rich, but that’s the market. Plus, from the venture firm’s perspective, a heady valuation only matters so much. Only slightly more than $20 million has been invested so far in the company, and any investor will have a liquidation preference, meaning they get paid first in the event of an acquisition. So a $50 million deal at any price wouldn’t lose money unless Foursquare winds up being worth less than $70 million.
One of the most remarkable things about this round was how deadly quiet Foursquare was able to keep the news. A few of the big Valley firms like Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark weren’t in the bidding for competitive reasons and very few others were invited to take a look at it. Few of Foursquare’s angel investors were even briefed about it. “Loose Tweets sink companies,” Crowley said. “The series B played out very publicly and it was hard for the company, so we came up with a better process this time.”
We have heard the company might be working on an additional round to cash out some early investors, to be closed at a later date. Crowley didn’t have a comment on that, other than to emphasize all of this round is going towards building the company and the door is open to future secondary deals if it’s the right thing for investors and the company

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Supporting choice, ensuring economic opportunity

At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first. We aim to provide relevant answers as quickly as possible—and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. Still, we recognize that our success has led to greater scrutiny. Yesterday, we received formal notification from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it has begun a review of our business. We respect the FTC’s process and will be working with them (as we have with other agencies) over the coming months to answer questions about Google and our services.
It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand. Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow. No matter what you’re looking for—buying a movie ticket, finding the best burger nearby, or watching a royal wedding—we want to get you the information you want as quickly as possible. Sometimes the best result is a link to another website. Other times it’s a news article, sports score, stock quote, a video or a map.
Instant answers. New sources of knowledge. Powerful tools—all for free. In just 13 years we’ve built a model that has changed the way people find answers and helped businesses both large and small create jobs and connect with new customers.
Search helps you go anywhere and discover anything, on an open Internet. Using Google is a choice—and there are lots of other choices available to you for getting information: other general-interest search engines, specialized search engines, direct navigation to websites, mobile applications, social networks, and more.
Because of the many choices available to you, we work constantly on making search better, and will continue to follow the principles that have guided us from the beginning:
Do what’s best for the user. We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience. Not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.
Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. Today, when you type “weather in Chicago” or “how many feet in a mile” into our search box, you get the answers directly—often before you hit “enter”. And we’re always trying to figure out new ways to answer even more complicated questions just as clearly and quickly. Advertisements offer useful information, too, which is why we also work hard to ensure that our ads are relevant to you.
Label advertisements clearly. Google always distinguishes advertisements from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and new types of content, we will continue to be transparent about what is an ad and what isn’t.
Be transparent. We share more information about how our rankings work than any other search engine, through our Webmaster Central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube. We also give advertisers detailed information about the ad auction and tips to improve their ad quality scores. We’ve recently introduced even more transparency tools, announcing a major change to our algorithm, providing more notice when a website is demoted due to spam violations, and giving advertisers new information about ads that break our rules.
Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. We want you to stay with us because we’re innovating and making our products better—not because you’re locked in.
These are the principles that guide us, and we know they’ll stand up to scrutiny. We’re committed to giving you choices, ensuring that businesses can grow and create jobs, and, ultimately, fostering an Internet that benefits us all.
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Bernanke passes early media test, challenge to come

(Reuters) - Ben Bernanke used his second-ever news conference on Wednesday to teach the world's financial markets a lot more about the thinking at the Federal Reserve than they could glean from its usual statements.
But the Fed chairman and former Princeton professor has yet to face one of the most important oral exams of his career: justifying and defending a change in the Fed's extraordinary monetary policy, when the time comes.
"There haven't been any big surprises or shifts in policy for Bernanke to sell," Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics said on Thursday.
"When this will earn its money is when the market response to the (earlier) statement is one way and he is able to correct any misperceptions. That will be when the press conference really pays off."
Bernanke's news conferences mark an important departure from the Fed's approach to communications that for decades used to put a premium on secrecy.
The Fed's focus is now on clarity after the its decision last year to embark on a second $600 billion round of bond-buying touched off a political firestorm with politicians accusing the central bank of jeopardizing the U.S. dollar with its bold experiments in monetary policy.
Looking less nervous than in his first news conference in April, Bernanke took questions from reporters for an hour on Wednesday and, displaying his professorial background, sounded confident and calm in his answers.
Bernanke's former number two said the gamble of exposing the world's most important monetary policymaker to the glare of the media was worth taking, given how hard it was to defend the Fed against the barrage of criticism over recent policy moves.
"I thought the circumstances were sufficiently unusual and the Fed was being sufficiently misunderstood and misinterpreted that giving the chairman cheap wholesale another shot, another couple of shots of explaining what the Fed was doing was very much worth the risk of an occasional misstatement or distraction," Former Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn told Reuters in an interview.
On Wednesday, Bernanke and the top Fed officials kept interest rates near zero and, using the same language they have for two years, said they will stay exceptionally low for "an extended period."
Asked exactly how long that is, Bernanke said "at least two to three meetings ... and I emphasize at least."
That unusually precise answer, for a central banker, helped calm financial markets worried about the slow pace of the U.S. economic recovery, said Todd Colvin, a futures broker at MF Global in Chicago.
Short-term U.S. interest rates are expected to stay below 1 percent until August 2013, according to futures trading on Thursday.
Bernanke also used the hour-long news conference to calm fears that inflation is getting out of hand, ahead of a hawk-heavy line-up of top Fed officials speaking next week that includes Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota and Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig.
"It's reasonable to think that core inflation will fall back toward mandate-consistent levels," Bernanke said on Wednesday.
At times last year, markets took their cues from the vocal hawks whose outspoken concerns that Fed policy would fuel inflation complicated attempts to create the sense of a Fed consensus that Bernanke now promotes.
"It gives markets a better context in which to interpret what they are hearing later from other members of the Committee," Kohn said of Bernanke's news conferences. "So I think it's a very positive development."
An analysis of Bernanke's comments show he talked more about unemployment on Wednesday than at his first news conference, signaling growing concern over the labor market (For a graphic please see: here )
"(Former Fed Chairman) Alan Greenspan was famous for needing a secrete decoder ring for trying to understand what he was saying," said Michael Hanson, a senior economist at Bank of America/ Merrill Lynch in New York. "I think Bernanke is much more willing to say what is on his mind."
While arguing that rising inflation leaves little scope for another round of stimulus, Bernanke listed several tools the Fed could use to ease monetary conditions further should it need to do so.
"There were definitely things that one learns," said Michael Feroli, an economist at JP Morgan Chase.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir, with additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal in Washington and Alexandra Alper in New York)

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Apple Preparing Faster IPhone for September

Apple Inc. (AAPL) plans to introduce a new iPhone in September that boasts a stronger chip for processing data and a more advanced camera, according to two people familiar with the product.
The device will include the A5 processor, the more powerful chip that Apple added to the iPad 2 earlier this year, along with an 8-megapixel camera, up from the 5-megapixel model in the iPhone 4, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. Apple is also testing a new version of the iPad that has a higher resolution screen, similar to the one now used in the iPhone 4, one of the people said.
The iPhone is Apple’s top seller, accounting for half of revenue last quarter. A faster chip will enable speedier loading of programs and help the device vie with handsets being introduced by rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co. that are powered by Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android software. The iPhone’s gains versus the BlackBerry partly explain why Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) last week forecast its first-ever quarterly sales decline.
The new phone will run the iOS 5 operating system Apple previewed at a developer’s conference this month. Codenamed “Telluride,” it will feature already-announced features such as improved messaging and photo-sharing, one person said. It’s also designed to run on all of Apple’s mobile devices, this person said. Until late last year, iPads, iPhones and iPod touches used slightly different versions of iOS.
Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, declined to comment.
Google’s Gains
Apple pushed back the release of the next iPhone -- its fifth -- to coincide with the release of the new iOS 5, the people said.
Apple has not kept pace with Google in the smartphone market, projected by researcher IDC to reach almost 1 billion units by the end of 2015. This year, Apple is projected to account for 18.2 percent of the global market, compared with 38.9 percent for devices running Android, according to IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.
The release of a new iPhone may help Apple cut in to Android’s market share, Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York, said in a report this week. He said Android customers are waiting for the next-generation iPhone, especially those on the Verizon Wireless network, which added Apple’s handset this year.
Cheaper iPhone
Apple is also working to finish a cheaper version of the iPhone aimed at attracting customers in developing countries, the people said. This device would use chips and displays of similar quality to today’s iPhone 4, the people said. Apple’s work on a smaller, lower-priced version of the device was discussed by people familiar with the matter in February.
The screen resolution on Apple’s new iPad would be about one-third higher than that of the iPad 2 and will boast a more responsive touchscreen, one of the people said.
The new iPhone will closely resemble the iPhone 4, the people said.
As Apple upgrades its mobile operating system it may eventually stop guaranteeing that all iOS apps run on older models, such as the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, one person said.
Apple, the second-largest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index behind Exxon Mobil Corp., fell 93 cents to $324.37 at 12:02 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. It has gained less than 1 percent this year before today.

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Yahoo Is Quietly Looking For Replacements For Carol Bartz, Says Report

Yahoo has a shareholders' meeting this week, and it promises to be a doozy.
According to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, Yahoo has already been quietly thinking about replacements for CEO Carol Bartz, including Fox Digital head Jon Miller and Yahoo board member David Kenny.
Arrington also talked to investor Eric Jackson, who said he's hoping for a major shakeup that puts Softbanks' Masayoshi Son or Alibaba's Jack Ma in the driver's seat.
Shareholders are also apparently upset with Chairman Roy Bostock and may be pushing for an ouster -- although Yahoo's board can override a shareholder vote -- and are also concerned that Bartz promoted former research chief Prabakhar Raghavan to chief strategy officer despite his lack of business experience.
Worst of all, Yahoo is expected to have an even tougher second half of 2011 than previously anticipated, although the stock probably won't go down much since investors have already discounted most of its business outside the Asian assets like Alibaba.

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