It is now a norm for many households to have more than one television installed at the home, but this generally comes with the need to buy another costly second Satellite Internet Service subscription if one wants to be able to install satellite programs on more than one. The good news is that you can ‘split’ two or more TVs on the satellite dish and receiver meaning you could end up saving a lot of money every month. Here is the information that is relevant to understanding the issue.
It appears one Receiver can provide multiple connections for a television.
Nearly all satellite Dish receivers have more than one output, meaning you can hook up to 4 TVs based on the receiver. This lets you connect your TVs in series into one system that works by using the one receiver box that your satellite provider offers. Thus, you would not need to have several satellite subscriptions with different services; with just one service from the satellite company, you can have satellite TV running on two or more television sets in your home.
The key things you’ll need are:
- A multi-TV receiver that has multiple outputs which enables it to support multiple outputs.
- Coaxial cables to link your various television sets
- Maybe a multi-switch box if you have four Television sets.
The receiver is placed at one end of the dish to capture the satellite signals to be transmitted. At the other extremity of the spectrum are outputs for the interface of several TVs with the help of coaxial cables. Having it this way means that the same signal from the receiver goes to the television sets and the cabling spreads through your house.
Using a Multi-Switch Box
These are the more complex setup scenarios that involve 4 or more TVs and, in such instances, you may have to use an external multi-switch to accommodate all the TVs you want to connect. The multiple-switch boxes are simply signal distributors – they accept the signal from the satellite and then broadcast it out of multiple outgoing ports that you can connect to other TVs in your house.
Some multi-switches come with receivers and others do not mean that if you need a particular receiver then you will need to buy it yourself. All you need to do is attach the satellite dish wire to the multi-switch input and then you can run cables from the output to the TV sets. For external multi-switch, it can accommodate up to eight televisions for a single satellite receiver.
Considerations for Multi-TV Setups
There are a few important things to note with multi-TV setups for satellite:
- I also discovered that the receiver has to be on for all the TVs to be able to receive a signal. This is because if you switch off the receiver in one room, the other TVs will not receive a signal as well.
- This means that all the TVs that are connected to the same receiver must tune to the same channel at the same time. You cannot have two or more channels working in two or more different rooms – all the people watch that channel where the receiver is set.
- HD channels are also offered, but they are cable and can only stream on one HDTV simultaneously. As to this, you will decide which TV you wish to watch the HD program on.
- Pause and live TV recording capabilities: This feature only offers what is in the channel being broadcast at the time and goes through all the TVs. But each TV has its satellite remote which can be used to control the playback of the devices separately.
With those considerations in mind, rearranging the satellite receiver to connect many TVs is a good idea to prevent having to pay for an additional monthly satellite subscription. Although there are certain disadvantages such as lack of separate channel control, it is often justified by the will to save money among most homeowners who desire to have satellite signals in different rooms. The only thing that I can recommend is to use multi-output receivers and correct cable wiring, and in this case, receiving two or more TVs from one satellite dish is completely possible.
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