Only when digital transmission was introduced did direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television become popular in North America, which has led to both DBS and DSS being used interchangeably to refer to all three commonplace digital transmission formats; DSS, DVB-S and 4DTV.
Analog DBS services, however, existed prior to DirecTV and were still operational in continental Europe until April 2012.
While functionally similar in DVB-S – MPEG 2 video, MPEG-1 Layer II or AC3 audio, QPSK modulation, and identical error correction (Reed–Solomon coding and Viterbi forward error correction), the transport stream and information tables are entirely different from those of DVB.
Also unlike DVB, all DSS receivers are proprietary DirecTV reception units.
DirecTV is now using a modified version of DVB-S2, the latest version of the DVB-S protocol, for HDTV services off the SPACEWAY-1, SPACEWAY-2, DirecTV-10 and DirecTV-11[2] satellites; however, huge numbers of DSS encoded channels still remain.