Life of satellites is the amount of propellant on board for station keeping. Most birds electronics will keep functioning long after it runs out of gas. That’s why the spacecraft folks are experimenting separate birds to latch on to the ones that are out of fuel to get more years use out if them. The goal is to do in orbit re-fueling sort of speak which is brilliant since the onboard electronics continue to operate. Going to be a while if any a switch to more efficient compression technology. Satellites could careless what is being uplinked to them and all subscribers boxes would need to be swapped out.The service is using Hevc and is only leasing two transponders so that should of kept the operating cost down but with Globecast handling the uplink and all how much do they charge for their services. Probably a lot. Dish or direct would be able to do the uplink them selves. It's about time they switch their systems over to HEVC also. They would not need as many transponder as they use now. That alone would save them money and space craft power and less space craft. Could make the satellites last even longer. The big dogs makes so money they just don't care about lowing the bills for their customer.The customer should come first but that's not the way it is.