British Satellite Broadcasting
 |
|
| Industry | Media |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged with Sky Television plc to form BSkyB. |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Defunct | 1990 |
| Headquarters | Marco Polo House, London, England, UK |
| Products | Pay TV services Programming |
British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) was a television company headquartered in London, which provided direct broadcast satellite television services to the United Kingdom. The company was merged with Sky Television plc in November 1990 to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). It started broadcasting on 25 March 1990.
In 1977 the World Administrative Radio Conference assigned each country five high-powered channels for direct broadcast by satellite (DBS) for domestic use. in 1982 after being awarded two of the channels the BBC proposed its own satellite service, with two conditions:
During Autumn 1983, the cost of the Unisat had been greatly under estimated, and the new Home Secretary announced the three remaining channels would be given to the IBA to allow the private sector to compete against the BBC on the DBS. within a few months the BBC started talking with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), about providing a joint project to help cover the cost. Subsequently, government allowed the IBA to bring in private companies to help cover the costs (dubbed the "Club of 21"):
With a year the consortium made it clear that the original launch date of 1986 was pushed back to 1988, while also asking the British government to allow them to tender out the building of the new satellite system, to help reduce cost. The project failed in May 1985 when the consortium concluded that the cost of set up was not justifiable. The BBC stated the costs were prohibitive, because the government insisted that the BBC should pay for the costs of constructing and launching a dedicated satellite.
The IBA convinced the Home Secretary to revive the DBS project but under different conditions, (broadly based on a report drawn up by John Jackson) by inviting private sector companies to apply for a new television franchise via satellite, to provide a commercial service on three of the five DBS in April 1986. One of the conditions imposed on applicants by the IBA was that they use a new, untried transmission standard, D-MAC. This standard was part of the European Community’s attempt to promote a high-definition television (HDTV) standard being developed by Philips and other European companies, HD-MAC. HD-MAC was still at the laboratory stage and was incompatible with previous standards: HD-MAC transmissions could not be received by existing television sets, which were based on PAL or SECAM standards in Europe. The conditions to use a High power (230 watts) Satellite was dropped, and no winner was precluded from buying a foreign satellite system.
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