Dish Network, direct tv business packages providers didn’t just appear over night. The development of satellite television took years and its origins can be traced back to the 1950s and the space race.The original concept of satellite television is often attributed to writer Arthur C. Clarke, who was the first to suggest a worldwide satellite communications system. Funding for satellite technology in the U.S. began in the 1950s, amidst the space race, and the Russian launching of the satellite Sputnik in 1957.The first communication satellite was developed by a group of businesses and government entities in 1963. Syncom II orbited at 22,300 miles over the Atlantic; the first satellite communication was on July 26, 1963, between a U.S. Navy ship in Lagos, Nigeria and the U.S. Army naval station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Overloaded land based distribution methods had the telephone companies utilizing satellite communication way before the television industry even came into the picture. In fact, it was not until 1978 that satellite communication was officially used by the television industry. In 1975, RWT's co-founder and BBC transmitter engineer Stephen Birkill built an experimental system for receiving Satellite Instructional Television Experiment TV (SITE) transmissions, beamed to Indian villages, from a NASA geostationary satellite.