The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered at the Comcast Building in New York City, NBC also has offices in Los Angeles at 10 Universal City Plaza and in Chicago at the NBC Tower.
A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. Communications satellites are used for television, telephone, radio, internet, and military applications. Many communications satellites are in geostationary orbit 22,300 miles (35,900 km) above the equator, so that the satellite appears stationary at the same point in the sky; therefore the satellite dish antennas of ground stations can be aimed permanently at that spot and do not have to move to track the satellite. Others form satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, where antennas on the ground have to follow the position of the satellites and switch between satellites frequently.
The Ku band is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in the microwave range of frequencies from 12 to 18 gigahertz (GHz). The symbol is short for "K-under", because it is the lower part of the original NATO K band, which was split into three bands because of the presence of the atmospheric water vapor resonance peak at 22.24 GHz, (1.35 cm) which made the center unusable for long range transmission. In radar applications, it ranges from 12 to 18 GHz according to the formal definition of radar frequency band nomenclature in IEEE Standard 521–2002.
Television receive-only (TVRO) is a term used chiefly in North America, South America to refer to the reception of satellite television from FSS-type satellites, generally on C-band analog; free-to-air and unconnected to a commercial DBS provider. TVRO was the main means of consumer satellite reception in the United States and Canada until the mid-1990s with the arrival of direct-broadcast satellite television services such as PrimeStar, USSB, Bell Satellite TV, DirecTV, Dish Network, Sky TV that transmit Ku signals. While these services are at least theoretically based on open standards, the majority of services are encrypted and require proprietary decoder hardware. TVRO systems relied on feeds being transmitted unencrypted and using open standards, which heavily contrasts to DBS systems in the region.
4DTV is a proprietary broadcasting standard and technology for digital cable broadcasting and C-band/Ku-band satellite dishes from Motorola, using General Instrument's DigiCipher II for encryption. It can tune in both analog VideoCipher 2 and digital DCII satellite channels.
Free-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscription, other ongoing cost, or one-off fee. In the traditional sense, this is carried on terrestrial radio signals and received with an antenna.
Superstation is a term in North American broadcasting that has several meanings. Commonly, a "superstation" is a form of distant signal, a broadcast television signal—usually a commercially licensed station—that is retransmitted via communications satellite or microwave relay to multichannel television providers over a broad area beyond its primary terrestrial signal range.
VideoCipher is a brand name of analog scrambling and de-scrambling equipment for cable and satellite television invented primarily to enforce Television receive-only (TVRO) satellite equipment to only receive TV programming on a subscription basis.
The PBS Satellite Service consists of feeds relayed from PBS by satellite to public television stations throughout the United States. The service was launched in September 1978. The service provides a mixed variety of programming selected from PBS's regular network services. In the X/XP years a satellite feed was multicast by some PBS member stations on an over-the-air DTV sub-channel along with their regular programming, or during overnight hours on their main channel to provide a second opportunity for viewers to watch or record primetime programming.
Satcom, a portmanteau of satellite communications, was a brand of artificial geo-stationary communications satellites originally developed and operated by RCA American Communications that facilitated wide-area telecommunications by receiving radio signals from Earth, amplifying them, and relaying them back down to terrestrial receivers.
SES Americom was a major commercial satellite operator of North American geosynchronous satellites based in the United States. The company started as RCA Americom in 1975 before being bought by General Electric in 1986 and then later acquired by SES S.A. in 2001. In September 2009, SES Americom and SES New Skies merged into SES World Skies.
NBC Weather Plus was an American weather-oriented digital multicast television network owned as a joint venture between NBCUniversal and the local affiliates of the NBC television network. The service, which was broadcast in standard definition, was carried on the digital subchannels of many NBC affiliates and on the digital tiers of cable providers.
KFDF-CD is a low-power, Class A television station in Fort Smith, Arkansas, United States, affiliated with the Spanish-language Estrella TV network. It is owned by Pinnacle Media alongside Univision affiliates KWNL-CD and KXUN-LD. KFDF-CD's transmitter is located on Pernot Road in Van Buren, Arkansas.
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 commonly referred to as a satellite dish and a low-noise block downconverter.
A free-to-air or FTA Receiver is a satellite television receiver designed to receive unencrypted broadcasts. Modern decoders are typically compliant with the MPEG-2/DVB-S and more recently the MPEG-4/DVB-S2 standard for digital television, while older FTA receivers relied on analog satellite transmissions which have declined rapidly in recent years.
The Florida Knowledge Network (FKN) was an educational television state network operated by the Florida Department of Education. The channel was seen statewide via the digital subchannels of most Florida Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member stations and nationwide on the AMC 3 satellite FTA (Ku band, Transponder 18).
AMC-8, also known as Aurora III, previously GE-8, is a C-band satellite located at 139° West, covering the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. It is owned and operated by SES World Skies, formerly SES Americom and before that GE Americom. The satellite provides critical telecommunications services to AT&T Alascom, which occupies most of the satellite's capacity. AMC-8 was launched in 2000 as GE-8, and replaced Satcom-C5 in March 2001.
Currently, there are two primary satellite television providers of subscription based service available to United States consumers: DirecTV and Dish Network, which have 21 and 10 million subscribers respectively.
Hellas Sat Consortium Ltd is the owner and a wholesaler of capacity and services of the Greek/Cypriot Hellas Sat 2 satellite, an Astrium Eurostar E2000+, which was launched successfully on 13 May 2003 to the 39th eastern meridian orbital position in the geostationary satellite orbit. On 29 June 2017 the Hellas Sat 3 was launched successfully to replace Hellas Sat 2.
WGN America was an American subscription television network that operated from November 9, 1978 to February 28, 2021. The service was originally uplinked to satellite by United Video Inc. as a national feed of Chicago independent station WGN-TV, making the station's programming available to cable and satellite providers throughout the United States as the second nationally distributed "superstation".
