How satellite TV works

Have you ever taken a minute to think how digital satellite TV works? Satellite TV, the best that could happen to television entertainment is a technological marvel. Satellite technology was invented several years ago to aid military and communication processes. No body would have thought, in the future. That this technology would be used to deliver endless hours of programming to the television screens of the general

Television satellites up in the sky, more than 22000 miles from earth are geosynchronous i.e. they rotate at the same speed the earth rotates and thus from earth they seem to be in the same position always
Satellite TV Providers like dish network or direct TV have their own set of such geosynchronous satellites. Dish network has more than 9 and direct TV has around 6 such satellites in space

The satellite TV provider get digital satellite quality feed from channels and content providers like cnn, HBO etc and other television channels and send it to their own broadcast facilities. Dish network has a broadcast centers in Englewood, Colorado and dish network has one in castle rock and one in Los Angeles

At the digital satellite TV broadcast centers the feeds are digitized, encrypted for security and beamed up to orbiting satellites up in space. The satellites in space in turn receive the signals, amplify them and beam it back into earth to be received by the millions of small dishes on people's rooftops

The satellite dish gathers this dish and passes it on to the receiver. The receiver does the job of converting the digital signals back into analog signals that the Television set can understand, decrypts the signals and sends it to the TV.