Satellite Communication in FIFA 2010 Broadcast

Millions of football fans are about to watch the FIFA World Cup live on TV. The action can be seen and heard thanks to a complicated network of communications satellites thousands of kilometers above our heads.

Our reporter Li Dong has the details.

Reporter: More than 100 million European homes received TV programs transmitted by satellites in 2008.

Jose Maria Casas is Senior Advisor to the Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications at the European Space Agency which operates satellite navigation systems for Europe.

He says the number of television programs transmitted from earth to satellites and back into our homes is immense.

"Today we are talking about satellites of 5, 6 or 7 thousand kilos with 50 to 100 channels, where you can put in a single satellite probably 500 television programs. And altogether in space at the moment there are about 300 satellites in the geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, and on those 300 satellites there are 25,000 programs."

When in geostationary orbit, satellites are supposed to move synchronically with the earth so antennas can point in a fixed direction and maintain a link with the satellite.

But the physical forces of space constantly push and pull them in different directions, obliging engineers on earth to adjust their paths regularly.

Nowadays, recognizing the importance of assisting in the development of new technologies, the European Space Agency is supporting crucial advances in the broadcasting and reception of TV images.

In the Netherlands, ESA engineers are busy developing the television of tomorrow. Marco Sartori, a telecom applications engineer with the ESA, explains the latest television craze – 3-D.

"3-D TV is when you're basically filming a scene with two cameras. One is acting as the left eye, one is acting as the right eye. And these two cameras have to be placed roughly the right distance apart for our human eyes. Then we take the signal, we transmit the signal over a satellite, for example, and we send it to a 3-D television. At the 3-D television end, basically what the television has to do is to show the right-eye image to the right eye and the left-eye image to the left eye. In order to do this, we typically use glasses, some systems. You can have batteries in the glasses, (while) others do not."

The parallel images are sent up to space on a high-definition channel. But Sartori says the ESA is exploring other technical solutions that could help set the European standard for 3DTV.

"What's very important is to be able to optimize the bandwidth that we use from the satellite. The satellite is an extremely scarce resource, so we want to make sure that we are optimizing every last bit that we can get from our satellites."

3-D filming will be available at five of the 10 FIFA World Cup stadiums. But 3-D or not, the World Cup is certainly generating excitement among football fans across the globe, not least in the townships of South Africa.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.