>   With 4DTV, you have the ability to place literally thousands of
> channels (video, voice, data, etc.) on transponders which previously
> only held a few dozen at most.
Digicypher is only 1 of many digital formats.
> You will soon see an explosion of satellite services arrive.
But how many of those will the home viewer be able to access?
The Family Channel is already using another format -- I think
Scientific Atlanta.  Other channels may also choose a format
that Digicypher will not receive.  You have no guarantee
that you will be able to receive even digicypher channels.
The programming may not be available to home viewers, and the
home viewer's dish may not be able to receive it due to
the interference caused by 2 degree spacing.  A dish that
can receive almost interference free analog channels may not
be nearly good enough to receive the digital signals.
Existing dishes may perform pretty well now, but wait until
the 2 degree neighboring satellites load up with digital
signals.  Then home dishes will have problems :(
>    The cost per channel for the uplinkers will decrease
There will be a big decrease in the cost per channel for
satellite time, but the overall cost will still be high.
The initial conversion cost is very high due to the high
cost of encoders.
> viewers choices will increase.
I guess you are talking about big dish owners.  I hope you are right.
I agree that choices will increase, but I don't know that it will
be via C-band.
> Subscription suppliers will be able to
> offer many new services to dish owners.
But will they care to reach the C-band audience?  FX could easily
sell their programming to C-banders, but they chose not to.
>    It's also going to happen to the over the air TV stations as well,
> even though some of them don't realize it just yet. 
TV broadcasters are going to lose about 25% of their spectrum
within a decade.  While it is true that TV stations will offer
more programming and data services in the digital age,
unfortunately broadcasters have not had the vision to plan
for the expansion of the TV service.  You use it or lose it,
and they lost it.  Broadcast data will be available, but it
will probably cost more than if broadcasters had done it.
Too bad :(
Perhaps a small dish DBS service will offer the data broadcasting
that TV broadcasters could have done if they had planned for
expansion.
> ... 4DTV is the way to go - if
> you want to be able to see anything more than about a year and a half or
> so into the future.  At about that point, I expect most of the
> transponders will have been converted because of the lower transmission
> costs.
Eventually most channels will convert to digital.  I expect the TV
networks and wildfeeds (direct feeds to stations) to convert to
digital before most cable type programmers.  However, I think that
there will be plenty for us to watch on our old systems for a few
years into the next century.
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