Acta Scientiarum http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs ISSN on-line: 1807-8664 Doi: 10.4025/actascitechnol.v44i1.59237 TECHNOLOGICAL INFORMATION Acta Scientiarum. Technology, v. 44, e59237, 2022 Structure and share of satellite TV channels and DTH platforms in Europe Krsto Jaksic 1 , Ivana Milosevic 2 , Branimir Jaksic 3* , Vladimir Maksimovic 3 and Jelena Todorovic 3 1 University of Pristina in Kosovska Mitrovica, Faculty of Economics, Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia. 2 Academy of Technical and Art Applied Studies, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia. 3 University of Pristina in Kosovska Mitrovica, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Knjaza Milosa 7, 38220 Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia. *Author for correspondence. E-mail: branimir.jaksic@pr.ac.rs ABSTRACT. This work deals with the structure of TV channels that are distributed from satellite positions where DTH platforms offer their services in European countries. The structure is being considered via service availability (FTA and PAY TV), resolution (SDTV, HDTV and UHDTV), standards of broadcasting (DVB-S and DVB-S2), satellites and satellite positions, as well as market share of leading satellite operators at European market through which DTH providers do their services to the ultimate users. We also represent the market of TV channel distribution through the number of household which use cable, satellite, terrestrial and IPTV. Collected data are represented as a table and graph for the period from 1996 to 2020. Keywords: Satellite operator; direct-to-home; SDTV (Standard Definition Television); HDTV (High Definition Television); UHDTV (Ultra High Definition Television). Received on May 15, 2021. Accepted on March 13, 2022. Introduction Direct-to-Home (DTH) technology refers to process of broadcasting satellite TV signal and other services and it is inclusively designed for TV reception in your home with personal antennas. This technology is previously marked as Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) technology (Alencar, 2009; Maral & Bousquet, 2009; Pattan, 1993). DTH technology is developed as a competition to TV services of cable operators broadcasting high-quality satellite signals with great number of TV channels. Satellite use in TV channel distribution when compared to distribution via cable of terrestrial transmitter, has significant advantages that reflect primarily in large coverage zone and unnecessary infrastructure construction. Due to large frequency range of transponders, distribution of great number of HDTV (High Definition Television) and UHDTV (Ultra High Definition Television) channels is more suitable to achieve via satellite than through use of other forms of distribution. Thus, nowadays besides SDTV (Standard Definition Television) channels, the largest number of HDTV and UHDTV channels are being broadcasted via satellite (Jaksic, Petrovic, Milosevic, Ivkovic, & Bjelovic, 2015). DTH services are broadcasted from a high-power satellites, so as their reception directly to homes is possible by using smaller-size antennas, from 60 to 90 cm. For distribution of DTH services in Europe Ku frequency range (11.7 - 12.2 GHz) is used. TV channels that are broadcasted via DTH are in digital format and mainly coded so as receptor/decoder of protected channels is needed (Valenti, 2011; Landeros-Ayala, Chávez- Cárdenas, & González-Sánchez, 2013). To distribute digital TV channels DTH platforms use two standards: DVB-S (Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite) and their second generation - DVB-S2. DVB-S2 offers about 30% of better performance than DVB-S (Tang, Zhang, Zhang, & Yue, 2017), which combined to MPEG-4/H.264 compression offers possibility that HDTV program could be broadcasted with the same rate that was previously needed for SDTV (Pechard, Carnec, Le Callet, & Barba, 2006). For video signal compression DVB-S standard mostly use compression MPEG-2 (Moving Picture Experts Group), while DVB-S2 use compression MPEG-4/H.264 for SDTV and HDTV, a HEVC/H.265 (High Efficiency Video Coding) for UHDTV (Wittig, 2014). In (Jaksic, Miljkovic, Maksimovic, Petrovic, & Gvozdic, 2020) it is considered satellite TV transmission for the region of the world in various frequency range (C, Ku, Ka) with all satellite positions for the mentioned region. This work deals with structure of TV channels that are exclusively distributed from satellite positions