BSB contract award | December 1986
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2012
- From the archives of www.transdiffusion.org
ITN announce that a consortium called British Satellite Broadcasting have won the IBA's beauty contest for the three available Direct Broadcasting by Satellite (DBS) channels they have made available. This would be increased to five channels before launch, although BSB were already doomed even before they went on air.
[For the reasons why, it's well worth reading the sympathetic account of BSB's short life in the book Dished!: Rise and Fall of British Satellite Broadcasting - available secondhand at www.waterstonesmarketplace.com... and elsewhere]
Here Peter Sissons introduces a report on Channel 4 News, then the late Carol Barnes does the same for ITV's News at Ten. ITN themselves soon fell out with BSB and were never involved in The NOW Channel or any other BSB output.
![British Satellite Broadcasting [BSB] D MAC Presentation - August 1988](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9Pn46qmBTW4/mqdefault.jpg)
![British Satellite Broadcasting [BSB] D MAC Presentation - August 1988](/img/tr.png)
Don't know if they were clueless, per se: television (especially the then monopoly-driven television) was still "a licence to print money"; Sky have later, again with a monopoly, become one of the largest (wireless) cable broadcasters in the world. If Astra hadn't come on the scene, BSB would have broken even by 1994 and have been making megabucks by 1999, even with just 5 channels. But the business plan, as you say, was hopelessly optimistic, the BSB board too large and Sky too nimble.
'Dished' is an excellent read. There needs to be one written on how OnDigital/ITV Digital failed as well. The curse of Marco Polo House!
Have you seen the ITV In The Face video on ITV Digital?
BSB never got the chance to get off the ground, When Sky merged with them, they could have taken the 3 channels they closed (Galaxy, Now and The Power Station), added them to the Sky Platform, which would have been nice, and switched to D MAC, but they chose to stay with the inferior PAL Videocrypt Broadcasts instead,
Inferior, but much, much cheaper to operate and much, much cheaper for the end customer to purchase. The Galaxy Channel in effect became UK Gold a few years later - almost all the non-original programming transferred to it because the rights reverted to BBC Worldwide who co-owned UK Gold. NOW: The Channel for Living had virtually no viewers amongst BSB subscribers but cost more than Galaxy and PS to run. The programming was planned to go over into a new Sky Arts channel, but there wasn't space on Astra for a channel that would lose Sky so much money. The Power Station was rip-off of MTV Europe, which was already on Astra and available free to air to Sky dish owners. It was not cheap to run due to the live content, and was unlikely to have challenged the profitable MTV Europe for ratings on Astra. It was therefore logical, from a capitalist point of view, to shut it down.
Well we can never know what might have happened. I chose BSB at the time and when I had to abandon D Mac for the appalling Videocrypt mess I was appalled. But hey! in 1998 Sky Digital converted me into a fan! Murdoch altered the face of British television-for good or ill? who knows...
Do you have any clips of when the Channel 5 tender was granted from around 1991?
2:52 There is the late Martin Jackson who helped Bob Southgate and James Gatward set up TVS.
Thank you BSB
Wasn't D-MAC basically the same picture quality as Scart-RGB as in a component signal rather than composite? Would have been interesting to see that with an analog signal. I had an analog receiver once but it was basic PAL with not the best colours. I also had a digital receiver and connected with scart, the difference between composite and RGB was night and day. The RGB was vastly superior and very pleasurable to watch on a good CRT tube television with clean and plain unprocessed 50Hz - not the supposedly 'better' 100Hz junk tv's with digital picture 'improvement' schemes that always made the picture worse.
Amstrad pioneered the cheap computer!? I think Sinclair and Commodore came about a good 4 years earlier...
Well Amstrad bought Sinclair, and Commodore wasn't all that cheap to start with (by the late 80s it was, granted).
DATE: 11 December 1986
Carol Barnes RIP
Wonder if any of the other four groups that got rejected would have made a better job of it.
The IBA - nothing but utter incompetence to be replaced by the even more incompetent ITC
Jason, they did the same recently during the sky/virgin spat. Virgin have to pay sky to carry sky channels and also had to pay sky to carry their own (flextec?) channels. When the spat was settled, virgin one was shut down and Living TV became Sky Living, because they didn't have a lifestyle channel. same as the skyBSB fiasco. BSB News boosted Sky News and Sky could rebrand the BSB Sports as Sky sports and not have to co-use EuroSports. the rest, as they say is history. I have to praise Sky for their pioneering work on getting Digital TV & HD-TV off the ground - more advanced than the BBC, I thought. (IMHO)
There was no BSB News channel or service. BSB news programming was limited to "rip and read" headlines from Reuters, two minutes on the hour at peaks on The Now Channel only.
Transdiffusion Broadcasting System I walk and text corrected! memory is a funny thing...😇
the fifth channel was The Sports Channel which became Sky Sports
0:07
Thank u, Tony Blair, for reading the news here.
4:51
Thank u also, Ian St. John
1:55 The text is having a seizure '-'
1:55
Those believed subscriber figures were way, way, way out.
Sky used the inferior PAL standard with hissy analogue stereo sound compressed by Wegener Panda 1 noise reduction to reduce hiss and PAL sparklies with a 60cm dish in Northern England especially if you use a crappy Amstrad which also produced sparklies in fine weather (they had appalling tuners which had awful weak signal sensitivity) and more generally in heavy rain, snow and hail.
Astra (non Amstrad) satellite receiver systems installed with 80cm dishes north of Birmingham in the Midlands generally gave better reliable all weather reception than a 60cm dish could and provided more sufficient rain fade margin for bad weather too.
NEC Pace Nokia Ferguson and better brands produced the best quality in pic and sound using better circuitry and genuine Wegener Panda 1 noise reduction which reproduced analogue stereo sound from satellite far better than many cheaper sound-alike noise reduction circuits in cheaper receivers i.e Bestlink Noise Reduction, Cambridge's and Technisat's Dynamic Noise Reduction, Echo Star's cheap EXP circuit and others.
Doesn't he look like Tony Blair does now.