While satellite's technical capability of point-to-multipoint broadcasting has been available for some time, the implementation and penetration of open standards—such as the digital video broadcast (DVB) satellite standard for television services and the DVB data standard for IP–encapsulated services—have occurred only recently. These new standards have created the ability to support today's applications more efficiently than ever.

The key to selecting satellite distribution instead of terrestrial options for these applications is economics, not technology, in most cases.

These applications typically have one or more of the following characteristics:

• Origination from a single site with simultaneous distribution to many remote sites
• Remote sites are located in geographically diverse areas
• Applications require delivery of large volumes of data to remote sites, with small volumes of return data, i.e., the data communication application is asymmetrical
• Applications involve delivery of multimedia services, such as streaming video and audio, Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) files and Web pages, or other multimedia content
• Remote sites have limited or expensive connectivity to the centralized site

There are two basic categories of satellite-based applications: real-time applications (streaming or interactive) and store-and-forward applications (non-real-time).