SatNEx IV project aims at studying medium and long term directions of satellite telecommunication systems for any of the commercial or institutional applications that can be considered appealing by key players although still not mature enough for attracting industry or initiating dedicated ESA R&D activities. This paper summarizes the first year activities identified as very promising techniques for next generation satellite communication systems. Concretely, very high throughput satellite trunking, physical layer advances for full-duplex and multipolarization systems, network coding applications and multiple access schemes for information centric networking are briefly presented. For all the activities, we identify the scenarios under study so as the preliminary technical solutions to be further investigated.