Why Dish & Satellite?

Sunshine and Moonlight got there first.

In the world of self-hosted cloud gaming, two open-source projects changed everything:

• Sunshine runs on your gaming PC and broadcasts the video and audio of your screen as a low-latency stream. A tiny private GeForce Now in your own house.
• Moonlight runs on your TV, your phone, your Steam Deck. It tunes in to that broadcast, decodes it, and plays your PC games wherever you happen to be sitting.

The names are perfect. Sunshine is the source: bright, always-on, energetic. Moonlight is the reflection: what you actually see, somewhere far from the source. The brand carries a whole mental model in two words.

Where do controllers fit?

Sunshine and Moonlight have always supported gamepad input. The controller plugged into Moonlight gets forwarded back over the stream. That model assumes the controller and the screen live on the same device. Stream to your TV with Moonlight running on a Shield TV, and the Shield's gamepad is the controller. Plug in your phone, and the phone's controls become the controls.

We wanted something else. We wanted to decouple the controller from the screen. Stream the video to a TV (or skip the video entirely) and let any device on your Wi-Fi be the gamepad. Just the gamepad. Multiple gamepads. Couch co-op. Pair the cheapest old phone in your drawer to your gaming rig and have a wireless Xbox pad in your hand five minutes later.

The broadcasting metaphor

Once we settled on the shape of the problem, the names wrote themselves. If Sunshine is the source of the video broadcast, we needed a source for the controller broadcast. Something that signals, relays, transmits.

A satellite. The thing in the sky that broadcasts.

And what catches a broadcast from a satellite?

A dish. The thing in your hand (well, in your yard) that receives.

Wait, isn't that backwards?

It would be, if Dish were the broadcaster. That's exactly the lovely twist of this stack: your phone is the source of the signal. You're the one transmitting. Your gaming PC is the passive listener, the satellite parked in the geostationary orbit of your desk, patiently catching whatever signals reach it.

Dish, the device in your hand, is the dish. It's the small, focused, tightly aimed transmitter pointing at the satellite. Every button press is a packet on a beam.

Satellite, the receiver on your PC, is the satellite. It floats. It relays. It serves whatever Dish chooses to send it.

Naming our family

So when you see this list of repos, you can read it in a single breath:

• Dish for Android (V1): a transmitter that fits in your pocket
• Dish for Windows / macOS / Linux (in development): transmitters for any laptop you've already got
• Satellite (V1, Windows): the receiver that lives on your gaming PC
• Satellite for Linux (in development): the same receiver for any Linux desktop or headless box

One satellite. Many dishes. All pointing at the same sky.

Thanks

Thanks to the Sunshine and Moonlight teams. For the technical groundwork that made all of this possible, for the brand language we shamelessly borrowed, and for proving that a tiny open-source project can hold its own against billion-dollar cloud-gaming platforms.

We hope Dish and Satellite earn their place in the same sky.