The downfall of British Satellite Broadcasting.

[merlodlliw]

Good Morning.

It comes back to my mind, that before I invested in the Alan Sugar Dish & reciever, there was a TV repair shop in Holywell,Flintshire who were selling
their own brand of made up reciever, it was a patio dish on a slab, they had done the local sightings, you just turned it, I was interested, but I am sure they wanted £250?, suppose it was a first everyman FTA.
Wished now I had bought it, but partner saw it was not sterio, but then SKY only used dummy sterio(panda), just to think I could have got the world,the dish by the way was about 80cm. No idea of the reciever make.

Bob

[Kay B]

@ Likvid

> TV3 started their transmission on Intelsat 27.5W in encrypted B-MAC.

> Private individuals could not get any subscription as it was for cable networks only.

> I worked in the biz back then and could arrange a decoder with some contacts at TV3 a authorized Scientific Atlanta decoder.


Must have been a great time.

As far as I know, B-MAC was originally a predecessor of C-MAC, but it was later used by Scientific Atlanta to add encryption techniques.

Was it possible to use the same receiver for TV3 and AFRTS?



@ lincsat

> There was an Alba and an Amstrad receiver, the Amstrad was way better than the Alba.

I still have an Alba and an Amstrad (the one with 48 channels). The picture quality is the same but the Amstrad can switch channels faster and has nice features like displaying the L band frequency.

[orbitalzone]

I'm pretty sure BSB offered 4 and half channels for free with movies being subscription based after 5PM at £9.99 a month.

Our business supplied and installed BSB and Astra systems back then, nearly all BSB purchasers did not bother to take out a subscription and I think BSB gave the movies for free for the 1st month as a taster.

Picture quality was superb, better than any current SD digital or analogue broadcast. 16/9 anamorphic widescreen was an option built into the receivers and I think they may have trialled a widescreen movie but no one had widescreen TV's of course (this was 1990)

Also there was BSB Datavision which was a data service rented out to businesses during the downtime of one of the channels. Comet used this data service I seem to recall.

As for those Matsu****a squarials, the build quality was superb and BSB had to heavily subsidies the cost, I think they bought them in for about £250 and bundled with receiver at some big loss... there was another brand of squarial that ITT Nokia/Salora used, it was an STC flat plate antenna that wasn't as well built as the Matsu****a one.

Oh and as for the satellite power, 55w for 3 channels and 110w for the other 2 ..... sweet. You could almost point the LNB at the sky and get something (no kiding, that almost worked with Olympus)

[merlodlliw]

You are correct about the picture quality, it was superb, at work a couple of chaps had sonys and praised the picture quality.

The downfall. Which gave Roopers the lead,on rubbish 19.2 pictures

1.Too longer a wait for the Square Aerial, in the end they used dishes in Wrexham.

2.Outbidding the BBC and ITV for film rights, with no real take up of clients prepared to pay.

3.Absolute lack of leadership, too much brag about Marco Polo house,and how wonderful BSB is, without getting it on air.

4.Roopers(SKY) ads everywhere, 16 channels without any subscription
joe public implied Ill pay £200 for Sky, not £300 for BSB and then have to pay to watch.

Well thats how I saw it, in the end delaying the start for the square aerial
lost it for them, gave sky the lead, if you did not have a sony in 1990.most sets were so bad you could not tell it was digital pics.

Then the film fiasco sent them bust.


Bob

[orbitalzone]

Certainly many people still only watched BSB via RF and not scart (many videos and tv's only had one scart or sometimes not even that)

[merlodlliw]

Originally Posted by orbitalzone

Certainly many people still only watched BSB via RF and not scart (many videos and tv's only had one scart or sometimes not even that)

Your right,the majority of tvs did not have a scart socket, Sony was the exception two scarts from the early 80s,otherwise it was BSB via the rf,
picture quality a little better than terrestrial if that.



Bob

[Likvid]

Yeah i remember we only used composite signals back then and with BSB you could get RGB out of the scart.

[merlodlliw]

Originally Posted by Likvid

Yeah i remember we only used composite signals back then and with BSB you could get RGB out of the scart.

Good Afternoon Likvid.

We have your weather today, Snow or as we say in Wales Era,gale force
winds also


Bob

[Kay B]

@ orbitalzone

> Also there was BSB Datavision which was a data service rented out to businesses
> during the downtime of one of the channels. Comet used this data service I seem to
> recall.

Yes, there was an additional data service. But was it really only active when the channels were off air? There should has been a lot of space in the D-MAC signal, even if the channels were on air. Like D2-MAC, D-MAC offered serveral audio tracks, but BSB should not have needed more than one audio track for each channel leaving lots of space for other data transmissions.

Has anyone tried to connect the BSB receiver's data port (a round socket, probably compatible to RS-232) with a computer?



> Certainly many people still only watched BSB via RF and not scart (many videos and
> tv's only had one scart or sometimes not even that)

And many people still do watch DVB signals via composite or even RF.




@ merlodlliw

> Well thats how I saw it, in the end delaying the start for the square aerial
> lost it for them, gave sky the lead, if you did not have a sony in 1990.most sets were > so bad you could not tell it was digital pics.

MAC pictures are not digital. They are broadcast analog with separated luminance and chrominance. But the audio is broadcast digitally using NICAM code (14 bits samples @ 32 kHz sampling rate; 14 bits are re-scaled to 10 bits for broadcast and "recompressed" to 14 bits when decoded). So it's not quite CD quality, but no lossy compresssion is used.

[Likvid]

It's chilly today and snow.