Satellite Wars: Pioneers and Pirates - The Full Story of BSB & Sky Satellite TV in the UK
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- Опубликовано: 9 сен 2018
- This documentary is about the launch of satellite television in the United Kingdom. It covers the launch of Sky Televison and British Satellite Television before they merged to create BSkyB in 1990. This documentary was first broadcast in 1995.
I love programs like this which document our fairly recent social history. Anything to do with the 80’s and early satellite broadcasting and I’m happy for hours!!!
Same
Certainly
Why don't channels make them anymore? I also liked stuff like Trouble at the Top. Oh well!
Wow, I've never heard of this! Read Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting, but wasn't aware there was a documentary on it too. It's an interesting point in television history and certainly something that piqued my interest, especially as BSB was better in terms of quality and production. Thanks for uploading this!
I agree with you on 'Dished: The Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting': it is a great book. Furthermore, I remember watching the documentary on Channel Four the first time around and it gripped me back in February 1995.
"Dished!" was also adapted into another documentary called "Square Peg: The Dream of British Satellite Broadcasting" by Bob the Fish Productions.
Interesting watch, would recommend.
@Otto Pomett seconded! matthew Harris (aka @bobthefish @applemask) is fab! and the bsb documentary was fantastic, not to mention with some great music choices from babybird and penguin cafe
The premier league saved Murdoch. If he hadn’t got the rights to show live games I don’t think sky tv would have lasted.
@Judgement A Come 👍👍
Thank you for uploading such a wonderful documentary
Amazing how this documentary was made a full three years before Sky Digital launched!
The BSB/Sky thing is crazy. It should be made into a film someday, with the streaming wars getting out of control.
I wouldn't say theres a 'streaming war' as such; rather those content owners/creators who back in 2011-2014 gave everything they had over to Netflix for a fee are now like "Oh shit, why dont we just do this ourselves and keep all the money for ourselves?"
I would absolutely watch that.
thanks very much for uploading
Thanks for uploading this. In Australia parts one and two were broadcast together as one program, and while going through old VHS tapes I found a recording of it, but I mostly only recorded the second half, so finding your upload of part one was very handy! Let me know if you want me to send you part two. :-)
I was one of the few people to have a BSB system, with it's signature "Squarial". Technologically, it was WAY mor eimpressive. Sky used the analogue Astra satellite system, which were never really intended for domestic reception. It was well "adequate" - the signal was pretty weak and if you got rain etc you'd get a storm of sparklies all over the TV picture. BSB used a dedicated, high power satellite specifically designed for domestic use. But of course, it was just too slow and too late. Sky had captured the market by getting in first with it's cheap and cheerful system; peopel really did not car emuch about picture quality, they weren;t willign to hang around for severla years for BSB to get it's act together. I remember being bitterly disappointed when the inevitable happened and BSB folded and got taken over by Sky. A big sellign poitn for me was that BSB had the rights to quite a lot of BBC stuff, including repeating Dr Who - they got to about the third or fourth William Harntell story and then vanished. We had to wait for UK Gold to launch after that...
I 'm not sure if BSB would have been cheaper than Sky
7:50 Now that's uncalled for!
If you'll excuse me I'm going to drink some tea and hum Rule Britannia to myself.
I watch this as @10:00 the history of that channel will come to an end. I never thought the day would come that Sky lose their mind completely but Sky 1 which was the Sky Channel (and it was another name in 1982 but oddly broadcasting from the U.K. But not freely available in the U.K.) will close down for the final time in September 2021 (next month).
I haven't watched Sky 1 in an age and changing its name to Sky Showcase (I think) sounds to me like the T.V. Adage of "selling ice cream in winter".
BTW, the woman @25:00 I seriously hope that when her lips were detached from her arse, there weren't too much severe damage done.
you don't wana fight the next war with last wars weapons..
i like that. well said lol
Thatcher would have let Murdoch do anything he wanted. She pretty much did in the 80’s.
No. Rupert Murdoch turned to SES-Astra in Luxembourg to cock a snook at UK broadcasting legislation and effectively sidestep any broadcasting regulations to piss off the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). They were absolutely furious and livid as a result. Maggie Thatcher wouldn't stop him and Rupert Murdoch wouldn't say boo to a goose either.
@@anthonyperkins7556 I was thinking more about the Times newspaper purchase in the early 1980’s but I agree with you.
40 years ago today Satellite started broadcasting in Europe
Sky was beamed via a medium powered 52dBW European satellite using the inferior PAL format which was sparklie prone in cloudy skies rain snow sleet and bad weather (and sparklie all the time if you had a shitty Amstrad with 60cm dish - they had atrocious sparklie prone tuners with appalling signal to noise ratio levels and crap sensitivity to weak signals), and compressed hissy Wegener Panda 1 stereo unless you had an Astra box with a genuine Panda 1 noise reduction circuit to calm the hiss of classic films, old UK Gold re-runs, music videos on MTV Europe shot on analogue videotape formats with hissy linear stereo soundtracks and made on grainy film with hissy sound, vintage hissy Bravo classics and old american videotape programmes - official Panda 1 equipped Astra receivers gave the best performance mono / stereo sound from the Wegener Panda 1 encoded audio subcarriers 7.02-8.28 Mhz.
BSB was a quality product with far better sound and picture quality and programming that's tailored to a UK audience i.e. quality not quantity over quality as the Murdoch empire would have us believe is better.
@David Mander On the Astra Satellite Analogue Wegener Panda 1 encoded audio subcarriers, there was a fair amount of hiss and background noise if you didn't use a receiver equipped with genuine Panda 🐼 1 noise reduction fitted.
These receivers had a Panda 🐼 logo on the front and gave the best quality mono stereo bilingual sound plus excellent fidelity radio from Astra's Wegener Panda 1 encoded audio subcarriers.
@David Mander 1.2m dish for Astra? Are you joking? Southern areas of the UK coped quite well for reception on a non-Amstrad receiver with a 60cm dish, but areas to the south west of England do benefit better on an 80cm dish. Shouldn't be sparklie on 1.2m dish at all, i've viewed Astra on a 1.2m motorised dish in NW England and the received EIRP is far greater than Astra's suggested and recommended 60cm dish size.
TBH, sparklies were down to it being analogue, not to it being PAL. It would have been the same had they been carrying SECAM or NTSC.
If they had used Digital PAL (which is entirely possible, in fact the broadcast tape format D3 from the 1990s is digital PAL) then this would have sorted the picture quality issues but relatively cheaply as the development costs of D-MAC would have been largely avoided.
All they would have needed to do is feed the signal as analogue PAL (with a decent comb filter to filter out PAL strobing) to an analogue-digital converter at the satellite uplink, bounce it off the satellite as digital PAL then convert the signal from digital back to analogue in the box.
For sound, NICAM would have done a better job. That already existed as well.
@@stickytapenrust6869 Sparkles were usually the result of a weak received satellite signal, the received signal strength at your location, the type and condition of your LNB, dish and cables etc, a satellite receiver's sensitivity to weak signals and a satellite receiver's signal to noise (S/N) ratio, too small a dish being used such as a 60cm dish being used in Northern England from North of Birmingham northwards up to the Scottish border, and in the Republic of Eire / Northern Ireland / Isle of Man too, obstructions in front of a dish like tree branches overhead cables etc or foliage covering the dish if mounted and installed where thick wall climbing plants are i.e. thick ivy etc, weather conditions i.e. cloudy skies rain hail or snow causing attenuation, especially on weak channels received on a 60cm dish i.e. the Astra footprints over the UK and how they fell varied on the polarisation modes, some of the transponder H/V footprint modes fell slightly more over the European continent than the UK being slightly weaker as a result over the UK.
@@stickytapenrust6869 Sky plumped for Beta SP analogue broadcast videocassette format for all recording editing and broadcast, it could output a composite CVBS PAL signal or a high quality component RGB signal and had multiplexed FM twin channel sound for stereo / 2 channel mono / bilingual sound as well as twin track linear stereo sound with Dolby B noise reduction.
Sky like many other satellite broadcasters plumped for Wegener PANDA analogue sound with 8 subcarriers from 7.02 to 8.28 MHz, which could provide 4 stereo tracks, 8 mono languages, four stereo radio stations or 8 mono ones provided the broadcaster only uses 6.50 MHz (mono) sound and opts not to use 7.02 / 7.20 MHz for stereo sound and the remaining pairs for three stereo radio stations or six mono radio stations.
So much better than Sky which has always been about populist nonsense
God almighty, he spent the night watching tv in languages he couldn’t understand. Sad!
It's not as sad as it sounds. For me It's more like "holy shit this is airing in the UAE right now, and I'm sitting here in Budapest"