Digital Satellite System is the initialism expansion of the DSS digital
satellite television
Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna com ...
transmission system used by
DirecTV
DirecTV (trademarked as DIRECTV) is an American multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital satellite service serving the United States. I ...
. Only when digital transmission was introduced did
direct broadcast satellite
Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna comm ...
(DBS) television become popular in
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and th ...
, which has led to both DBS and DSS being used interchangeably to refer to all three commonplace digital transmission formats - DSS, DVB-S and
4DTV. Analog DBS services, however, existed prior to DirecTV and were still operational in continental Europe until April 2012.
At the time of DirecTV's launch in 1994, the
DVB-S
Digital Video Broadcasting – Satellite (DVB-S) is the original DVB standard for Satellite Television and dates from 1995, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997. The first commercial applications was by Star TV in Asia ...
digital satellite system in use in the majority of the world had not yet been standardised, the
Thomson developed DSS system was used instead.
While functionally similar in DVB-S –
MPEG 2
MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
video,
MPEG-1 Layer II or
AC3 audio,
QPSK
Phase-shift keying (PSK) is a digital modulation process which conveys data by changing (modulating) the phase of a constant frequency reference signal (the carrier wave). The modulation is accomplished by varying the sine and cosine inputs ...
modulation, and identical error correction (
Reed–Solomon coding and
Viterbi forward error correction
In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, (ECC) is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea i ...
), the transport stream and information tables are entirely different from those of DVB. Also unlike DVB, all DSS receivers are proprietary DirecTV reception units.
DirecTV is now using a modified version of
DVB-S2
Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the Digital Video Broadcasting Projec ...
, the latest version of the DVB-S protocol, for
HDTV
High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...
services off the
SPACEWAY-1,
SPACEWAY-2,
DirecTV-10 and
DirecTV-11[{{Cite web , url=http://dtv.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=324646 , title=The DIRECTV Group, Inc. - DIRECTV Remains Clear HD Leader with 130 HD Channels on Tap for Mid-August , access-date=2008-08-03 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080805052202/http://dtv.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=324646 , archive-date=2008-08-05 , url-status=dead ] satellites; however, huge numbers of DSS encoded channels still remain. The ACM modulation scheme used by DirecTV prevents regular DVB-S2 demodulators from receiving the signal although the data carried are regular MPEG-4 transport streams.
See also
*
direct broadcast satellite
Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna comm ...
References
External links
DSS, the "Other Other" MPEG-2 system
Satellite television
Digital television