DCDC lowers pricing

[Mike Blakesley]

I know you don't usually get snow in San Francisco, but if a dish gets snow in it would you need to go sweep it out for your system to work?

[James Gardiner]

@Rick, yes, there is a scale issue. But it does show the disparity is vast, plus one is supplying a sustained bitrate requirement ($$$) and DCPs don't need that. I have spoken to some CDN owers about the cinema requirements and he admitted, you wouldn;t bother using a CDN, your better of doing some basic implementation yourself.. Due to the non-critical delivery speed requirement. i.e. use backblaze, or pay for a VPS with 10GBe connectivity is strategic locations yourself.

At the end of the day, in this new environment of super fast internet, its not unreasonable that a distributor simply puts DCPs on a website and cinemas just download the file. Or better, put some basic standards around it for the TMS makers to integrate into the system, and it needs no more infrastructure than what you have for Email. (Next to none)

@Jim, a major issue we had when I was involved in a Satellite company was that putting a dish on a shopping centre, was prohibitively expensive. The shipping centre wanted to RENT out the space on the roof, even if it was on top of the cinema making it extremely expensive for many locations. It simply did not make sense in Australia or small countries, or low density. The U.S. with high a density population, a high, cinema density. Originally there was going to be DCDC and deluxe but it collapsed as the numbers didn't add up and we ended up with 1 company. If one of the highest-density areas of the world had a hard time servicing only 1 company. Imagine with the lower density on average and smaller regional segments needing different content supplied. The US and Eu is pretty much the only regions satellite makes sense for digital DCP delivery. And that's also now becoming questionable as the internet is now competitive to those options.

[Frank Cox]

Snow is always a problem with satellite dishes. A heavy snowfall (or even heavy rain) can also disrupt the signal while it's underway.

Anyone around here with satellite tv has to brush their dish off after a snowstorm.

[Jim Cassedy]

I know you don't usually get snow in San Francisco, but if a dish gets snow in it would you need to go sweep it out for your system to work?

I guess so. Back in the early 2000's when I did some work as a broadcast video engineer/tech for
AT&T, we had some very large satellite dishes up in the hills of San Ramon, CA (abt 45 mi east
of SF) that were used to downlink various network TV network feeds and send distribute them to
cable TV head-ends, and I know those dishes were equipped with some sort of 'de-icing' system t
o keep snow from accumulating on them in the winter. However, in very heavy snowfalls, someone
actually did have to sweep them clean. The heaters went on when the temperature dropped below
a certain temperature, snow, or no snow. I remember our techs noticing some strange dips in signal
level sometimes early in the morning or after dark on cold nights. They sent me to out there to take
a look one time, I saw nothing, except for some barely visible dark-ish circular spots near the lower
rims of two of the larger dishes. Eventually, we found out that on cold nights, when the heaters kicked
on, either possums or raccoons would curl up and spend the night on the warm dish surface. Even in
the summer months, they'd spend part of the mornings there, as the dish was warmed by the sun. lol

a major issue we had when I was involved in a Satellite company
was that putting a dish on a shopping centre, was prohibitively expensive. The shipping
centre wanted to RENT out the space on the roof, even if it was on top of the cinema.

Yes, thanks largely to the mobile phone industry, formerly unused roof space has become valueble
real-estate property in may cities & towns!
Bak in the early 70's I sometimes filled in at my buddy's theater on his night off. TV reception was
lousy in the booth using rabbit-ears due to all the RF and the fact that the theater was in a strip
mall, and its' roof was lower than the Home-Depot type business next door. So, one night, around
2am, after both the theater and the home hardware store were both long closed, I helped him
sneak up onto the roof and we put a good TV antenna on the big building next door and ran the
cable across their roof to the theater & down into the booth. Even though we had done it without
their permission, our conscience was somewhat cleared by the fact that we bought everything - -
the antenna, the mast, the mounting brackets ,the coax, the standoffs, etc from the very store
we were putting it on top of. It was a very professional installation, if I must say so myself, and
it survived several severe Long Island winters, and only came down when the entire roof
of the home-goods store collapsed under a particularly heavy snowfall one year. (maybe
the extra weight of our antenna installation was the 'straw that broke the camel's back?)

[Rick Cohen]

Snow is always a problem with satellite dishes. A heavy snowfall (or even heavy rain) can also disrupt the signal while it's underway.

Anyone around here with satellite tv has to brush their dish off after a snowstorm.

We have a heated dish. We only plug the heater element in if/when there is snow or ice on the dish.