The first  satellite tv  transmission may have been made in 1962, but at the time the equipment needed for receiving satellite signals was quite expensive and it often took quite a bit of technical expertise to be able to make use of the signals. It wasn’t until 1976 when the Soviet Union launched ‘Ekran’ that direct-to-home (DTH) television became available. It wasn’t until several years later that the rest of the world was able to make use of this kind of technology and only recently has this technology been cheap enough for general use.