Television broadcasting is very essential now days. The television is best entertainment medium today. We get news, serials, movies, health, and educational program for kids on the Television. This is not only giving news on our country but also news from other countries in the world. To cover the world or global news television is broadcasted on satellite platform. There are more satellites in the geo stationary orbit which serves D2H (Direct to Home) Broadcasting Television services.
There are two types of Television services. Namely: 1. FTA (Free to Air) can be watched by downlinking Television services from satellite without any fee that is free.
2. Paid services (encrypted services) which can be watched after paying / subscribing the Television services.
These services are a pack of numbers of television services which is mostly having movies, adult’s movies, live sports broadcast and similar TV services. The Dish TV, and Version TV services, they have several 10-50 TV services in the pack. Though some news services are also their but can be watched free. When it comes to adult’s movies, prone channels, they asks password to be entered to watch the service. Some wants de-encryption cards to open these channels on the down link to watch them.
The channels are created in the studio by individual service provider (clients).They upload movies, & advertisement in between from their play out system. Advertisements may be in every 15 minutes or 30 minutes as agreed with managements. There may be only two-three advertisement as per their durations and agreement with channel owners. Free to air TV channels have more advertisement say 5 to 10 minutes duration.
These advertisements are depends upon charges, and time when the advertisements to be appeared. Prime time is from morning 8 AM till 12 AM and then from 4 PM to 10 PM. During this time advertisement is charged more than compare to 10 PM onwards till early morning 6 AM. This is why you see more advertisements in FTA services in duration 5 to 10 minutes. Thus longer outage in clients TV service affect the revenue of clients.
The operations are a sensitive area where technician and engineers are working hard. They are trying to discharge their duties faithfully. They do all necessary work to complete the job without any problem. They check system, services and other important points which they feel essential to get optimum performance.
Individual TV services, channels are transported to teleport via fiber link, microwave, or physical tapes. Some are turndown from other satellites at teleport and taken for uplink. The services are grouped for individual satellites at teleport. Here all services are encoded, multiplexed, ASI stream from Multiplex modulated and then up converted, amplified and send to satellite. Likewise services on different satellites are muliplexed and uplinked. Depending upon TV services their bandwidth is arranged in the multiplex. It is set from 1.5 MB to 3.5 MB for Movies, news etc. while live sports are set for 4 MB. These are bandwidth on SD services mode. For HD services the bandwidth are set 3 MB to 5 MB. Thus on a transponder with 36 MB we can have mixed 15 to 20 SD services or 10 to 12 HD services only.
Play out service also given from teleport for clients who do not have their studio in the vicinity of the teleport city. There tapes were ingested and playlist prepared and scheduled the play out of service as agreed by channel or service owner.
Teleport operations team downlink the satellite services which are uplinked by them. The L-band from the LNB is divided and fed to individual IRD, select a service, and extend to monitor TV for display.
Today software is available to decode these down link services and display on TV walls. You can bring to monitor TV kept on the table to check audio and video of the services. While software monitor QOS is also available in them system.
In case of outage in the service, tech on duty sees it and start finding the problem and trying to fix it.
In some cases, service owner called teleport and lodge complaint to technical team at teleport. Tech take call from client and start checking for problem if he observed the service at teleport also affected or black. Some time at teleport service is running ok but at client’s end it is black. In such cases if tech said we are getting your service in the down link ok at teleport immediately client will not agree so you have to hold him and after few second bring his service on desk monitor and let him listen Audio on telephone.
In case of real problem as discussed in case by case further in this book from page No 19 onwards. It may take time to fix the problem say five to ten minutes.
Client in the panic do not have patient to wait from tech to reply but complaints to manager in-charge of Teleport operations. Manager will tell client let me check. The manager calls tech on duty and yelling on him why co-operation is not given to client. Why you took so long time to fix the problem. He may start shouting to show off his seniors at teleport that he is taking class of the tech on problem. Is it shows that he is a good manager? Or Tech at operations is not capable to handle the problem?
In fact it is not the scenario always. Some time it happened with newly join tech which has recently joined. Manager may call tech and listen him then suggest the way it might have solve quick in friendly manners rather than shouting on him.
We know that advertisement missed during the outage will account on the client and may ask for pay back compensation from them. It is possible for longer duration of outage as all the advs. falling in that duration may claim it. Thus it is loss to channel operator.
In this book it is given brief steps how to tackle the outage complaint from clients /channel owner. On various scenario of complain tech have to listen quietly and then act accordingly.
This is listed under the topic “effective communication.” Please go through it and act likewise to avoid manager barking on you.
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