Pittsburgh International Telecomm. sues for unpaid uplink services

[skysurfer]

It's not often you see a link or news item about a satellite uplink related lawsuit, but here's one that came across my screen concerning PIT on Galaxy 19 Ku-band:

Lawsuit: Persian broadcasting company from N.Y. did not pay for satellite transmissions

 

[MosFET77]

#WOW is that why we are seeing some channels leave?

 

[Jim S.]

Between the channels going down all the time and the ones that look like they're being fed by dial-up modem, I pity anyone who tries to watch 97W on a regular basis...

 

[Lone Gunman]

Between the channels going down all the time and the ones that look like they're being fed by dial-up modem, I pity anyone who tries to watch 97W on a regular basis...

That may be true of the Ku side of that satellite. I don't do foreign language stuff and only have a couple of TPs scanned in Ku just to have a channel or two to make it show up. I do, however watch a fair amount of stuff on the Cband side and don't have any problems receiving those stations? Maybe your dish needs a tuneup?

 

[iBoston]

I dunno, with Interest and penalties they are applying, sounds more like the Mafia trying to collect :

MSC avers as of May 1, 2016, an unpaid balance of $48,550 remains due and owing to it, due to the Tapesh’s failure to pay for the aforementioned services. Per the agreement, an interest rate of 18 percent month applied to the contract, translating to $13,288.07 spanning May 31, 2016 through Dec. 7, 2017. Furthermore, the defendant is liable for reasonable collection costs of $16,183.33, the suit says.

 

[N5XZS]

I noted some stations on G-19 bird are doing a beg a thon marathons to save their station to stay on the bird. Most are under budget and very poor video quality mostly from IPTV.

 

[Brct203]

well, many of the stations on 97W Ku are either from immigrant communities in the US (I can think of some Vietnamese and Persian channels), or from some developing countries. In both cases, budgets might be very limited. So that probably explains the very low bitrate on some channels, unfortunately to the point where it's barely watchable. Yeah it's lousy image quality, sometimes lousy production quality, but on the other hand it's quite amazing that we are able to get channels from countries from all over the world.

 

[skysurfer]

#WOW is that why we are seeing some channels leave?

I also imagine there is a lot of special offers going on. It's not uncommon to see a channel bounce around among the various uplinkers on the Ku-band side so they may be getting better carriage terms from time to time as the various uplinkers compete for their business. Some of it also may be temporary free trials -- I believe I saw a G19 Ku-band programmer mention once that one of the uplinking companies gave him a 30 or 60 day free trial that would convert to a carriage fee if that programmer stayed on that capacity.