The IDEAL complement to Your Home Theater System

High Definition Satellite TV (1)

Ever since the first HDTV sets appeared on stores shelves, high definition satellite TV has been marketed as capable of delivering life-like imagery and sound that renders your TV viewing experience as the next best thing to being there!

Surely, satellite HD television is capable of great image and sound but... what is exactly high definition satellite TV, and to what extend it is capable of delivering a great picture and immersive sound? How can you receive satellite HD television programming, and at what expense?

What is High Definition Satellite TV?

The simple answer is satellite television in high definition!

In other words, the real difference between standard definition satellite TV and high definition satellite television broadcast is due to the characteristics of the HDTV format rather than the digital satellite transmission medium itself.

More specifically, it is the drastic increase in picture resolution brought about by HDTV over standard television that leads to the unmatched picture quality supported by digital satellite HDTV.

We do have an extensive guide that discusses high definition TV and the different HD formats - 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. We are not going to repeat all that information here, so we highly recommend that you would go through our 'Guide to HDTV'.

However, for the scope of this article, it is enough to mention here that high definition TV supports a picture resolution of 1280 pixels by 720 lines in 720p format, and 1920 pixels by 1080 lines in 1080i format. This contrast heavily with the 330 horizontal lines supported by standard analog television, and the 480 lines by 640 pixels supported by standard DVD and digital TV systems - whether terrestrial or carried over satellite.

This implies that like its terrestrial HDTV broadcast, high definition satellite TV delivers a theoretical picture resolution that is up to 6.75 times that of standard digital television when using 1080i HDTV.

We say theoretical as in actual fact, high definition satellite TV service providers often reduce the horizontal resolution of a 1080i image to 1280 pixels - mainly to limit the bandwidth requirements so they can send more channels. This is somewhat similar to what off-air TV stations do when broadcasting 1080i content - reducing the horizontal resolution to 1440 pixels - to reduce the visibility of interlaced artifacts while limiting bandwidth requirements to be able to deliver more content over the same allocated bandwidth space into people's homes. This is often referred to as 'down-rezzed' HDTV.

Still, this yields an image resolution that is almost five times that supported by standard digital television. True that down-rezzed HDTV content do not look as sharp and clear as pure HD, but these images still look great — much better than that possible with standard-definition TV systems.

The impact in image detail resulting from this higher picture resolution afforded by high definition systems - even down-rezzed HDTV, is significant and becomes even more visible as one moves to the big screens of today's home theater systems.

You may not be able to see any difference in image quality on say a small 26-inch or even a 32-inch LCD HDTV, between a standard definition image and high definition content. But you will definitely notice the difference resulting from the higher image resolution supported by HDTV over a standard definition image, when viewing your high definition satellite TV content, or in that case any high definition TV programming, on a large 55-inch screen.

There is also the issue associated with all HDTV programming - satellite, digital terrestrial, and cable TV - that high definition content is transmitted using an aspect ratio (the ratio of the screen width versus height) of 16:9. This is in effect closer to the film original aspect ratio while at the same time, providing a much wider viewing area that is closer to the human field of view.

And to complement its great picture, high definition television also comes with a Dolby® Digital 5.1 Surround Sound for a more immersive viewing experience. This renders high definition television programming - irrespective of whether it is high definition satellite TV or digital terrestrial HD broadcast - as the best choice to complement one's home theater system.

So... what is so remarkable about today's digital High Definition Satellite TV?

It is clear that the issue is more than just image quality because as we have seen in this introductory discussion on high definition satellite TV, both HD digital satellite television and terrestrial high definition TV support the same image detail and sound quality. However...

There is one important distinction in favor of high definition satellite TV over terrestrial HD television - it is the diverse content that is available in HD over digital satellite that makes the whole difference.

The numerous channels available in HD over satellite with so much diverse content render digital satellite television as the best choice to complement one's home entertainment system. This is possible thanks to the way satellite service providers operate as 'content aggregators'.

In this respect, digital satellite television is proving to be the ideal and most effective transmission medium to deliver several tens of HD channels to end-customers via a single TV reception set-up.

Receiving High Definition Satellite TV: What equipment do you need?

Unfortunately, there is the need for more than just a high-definition TV set to be able to receive HDTV programs over satellite TV. You also require an HDTV-enabled satellite receiver, the appropriate satellite dish, and a subscription to an HD satellite TV program bundle.

If you are upgrading your digital satellite service to receiver HDTV, you may need to install either a second dish or replace your present satellite dish with one that is MPEG-4 compatible.

In the second part of our Satellite HDTV article, we discuss the available high definition satellite TV programming bundle offers from DirecTV and DISH Network, as well as the recommended satellite TV guides to use with these services.

..next: Satellite HDTV - Part 2: Programming Options

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