Might look like this. might not.
EETimes.com – India plans mobile TV satellite A more efficient system to do deals to take American jobs away.
BANGALORE, India — The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is finalizing the design of a specially-loaded satellite having a big antenna that can be unfurled to provide mobile television signals.
This satellite will also have the technology to significantly compress data to MPEG 4 standards for small screens and the very high power to enable omni-directional transmission, according to a report in The Hindu Business Line on Friday (Jan. 27). A prototype is being evaluated, it said.
It doesn’t state if the bird will be positioned for North American reception, though I assume that there will be more than one. Getting these things in orbit is expensive and risky. It’s safer just to arrange leasing transponder space and let another company take the R&D and launch risk.
Now why would a satellite do MPEG compression ?!. Would you not compress it before uplinking?. What is this “MobileTV” anyway ?. Obviously you are not going to beam TV to mobile phones, sounds more like your typical DTH (Dish/DirectTv).
To answer Mr Taylor’s question about leasing, Indian govt. likes to custome design and own the satellites it uses (it has been that way for decades).
Now why would a satellite do MPEG compression ?!.
Funny, that was the first question that popped into my mind.
John’s “Might look like this. might not” – also makes me suspicious. 🙂
We might buy Japanese and Korean cars by the boatload here in America, but when it came time for the Japanese and Koreans to buy a satellite for beaming TV to phones, they bought American. The satellite was built in California, and launched in Florida. Here’s a picture:
http://www.loral.com/inthenews/040427.html
There is a quagmire of problems awaiting the Indians, similiar to the quagmires that the Koreans and Japanese found. On the bright side, at least the engineers working on the Satellite systems don’t have to work in a call center, yet.
I’ve been thinking about the on-board mpeg4 compression.
It didn’t make sense if the everything passing through the satellite was going to be converted to mpeg4, but it makes sense if it is a dual-purpose relay – via the regular attennas for normal relay, and providing mpeg4 encoding for output through the “big” antenna.
So this satellite could do for “mobile” TV, what GUBA does for iPod/PSP users.
http://www.guba.com/
I wish some indian whold take my job. Hell the mex’s wont evan take it.