At first it must be said that the satellite platform is able to bear a number of channels, much higher than the terrestrial platform. The reason is purely technical, due to the inherently larger bandwidth of the satellite platform. For example, in a typical Italian region there are between 200 and 300 programs available on digital terrestrial television, whereas by pointing your dish toward a specific satellite over 1000 programs become available. Add to this technological reason, a market consideration: the spectrum allocated to digital terrestrial television services is very crowded, so it is expensive to allocate available bandwidth to transmit high-definition. Satellite bandwidth, instead, is available in larger quantities and therefore cheaper than spectrum allocated to terrestrial television. However, it can be expected that High Definition will gradually supplant standard definition on all platforms, with the uptake of compression techniques and digital signal modulation techniques more efficient in bandwidth usage.
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