Taiwan Gets Asia's First Satellite TV Service

New Web-hosted multimedia magazines and data-enhanced TV programming are to come.

Stella Kao

Pay TV subscribers in Taiwan are among the first in Asia to receive direct-to-home (DTH) TV program services from digital TV satellites. Acer, Taiwan's largest computer company, recently released a satellite-based set-top box, and the company is working with Space TV Systems, a Sino-American program provider, to offer free Chinese programs over a satellite to the global Chinese community. Space TV Systems began operating in the U.S. market early this year.

Space TV Systems and Loral Skynet, which is a subsidiary of Loral Space & Communication in the U.S., have recently reached an agreement in which Spa ce TV Systems will lease a 54-MHz Ku-band transponder on the Telstar-4 satellite to distribute Chinese TV programming throughout North America. The agreement is valued at $20 million over 10 years.

In Taiwan, Space TV Systems provides 80 channels of digital programming through a pizza-size satellite dish, remote control, and the AcerStar set-top box with integrated decoder that connects to TV sets. The number of channels will increase to 160 in the first half of 1998.

The AcerStar set-top box uses a 32-bit Mips RISC processor and comes with an antenna system that receives up to three satellites simultaneously, the only one in the worldwide market. AcerStar is priced at $350 without an antenna.

Also on the horizon are a new generation of home entertainment devices with integrated MPEG-2 and digital videodisc (DVD). To allow these functions, ever-sophisticated OSes will be added to run increasingly complex hardware.

In response to d igital TV subscribers' need to upgrade to next-generation digital set-top boxes, the next version of AcerStar, due out by the end of the year, will let digital satellite TV subscribers surf the Web via high-speed satellite hookups. The downstream path's bandwidth of the unit is up to 30 Mbps. By comparison, modems today download only 33 Kbps at best.

The broadcast content that users can now download includes digital high-resolution TV entertainment programming. The company will expand this to include broadcast Web sites, video-enhanced multimedia magazines, and data-enhanced TV programming.

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Where to Find

Acer, Inc.

Taipei, Taiwan
Phone:    +886 2 545 5288
Fax:      +886 2 545 5308
E-mail:   
olivercheng@acer.com.tw

Internet: 
http://www.acer.com


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Surf the Web via Satellite

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Coming Soon to a Version of AcerStar Near You

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The next version of AcerStar will enable high-speed Internet access.