1986: BSB wins the DBS franchise

It was flogged off the Swedish who used both satellites to transmit some channels, Wikipedia doesn't give much information, but I'm sure someone will give further detail.

Sky announced in the week of the BSB merger that they would give BSB subscribers the chance to switch to Astra, which obviously happened, but BSkyB were still on Marcopolo by December 1992.

But of course there also would have had to give everyone new boxes. I wonder why there chose to use Astra.

That would seem like a much cheaper solution than they went for which was to build a totally new uplink facility in Chilworth, Hampshire. IBA programme about the building of this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODo0qBFpVhg
Chilworth is now home to Sky's uplink, some of it's channel playout and as a disaster recovery site. I assume they got this as part of the merger, but whether they had to buy it from the IBA I don't know

Here's another IBA programme from the week of BSB's launch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wm6WkFhHs8

Presume you mean the Marco Polo satellites?
One was sold to a Norweigan company, the other to a Swedish company and both ran out of fuel about ten years ago, now floating about in so-called "junk orbit".

As I said, it seems there was a consensus at the time that high-power satellites were expected to be the primary way to receive satellite TV, and governments didn't consider medium-power ones like Astra suitable for DBS.

I doubt there was anything that strictly prevented either the BBC or BSB from launching on Astra if they had felt the Marcopolo satellites were doomed. If the BBC had launched its two proposed channels on the Marcopolo satellite, one could imagine that they would have eventually moved to Astra (if the Europe-wide beam wasn't a major issue). The German public broadcasters were relatively quick to secure transponders on Astra when they realised the TV Sat project wouldn't succeed.



Marcopolo 2 was sold to Telenor in 1992 and became the first Thor satellite on 1 West. Marcopolo 1 was sold to NSAB (Sweden) the following year and became the first Sirius satellite, joining Tele-X on 5 East.

For the better part of the 90s, the Nordic positions were largely filled with satellites from failed high-power projects. Telenor also took over TV Sat 2 and moved it to 1 West.

As an aside, its probably worth mentioning here that QVC vacated Marco Polo house over the weekend.

Where there gone?

Chiswick Park.

Yeah, I have a friend at QVC who told me it's being demolished, which is a shame really - a bit of TV history going, there.

Yes, to be replaced with flats: http://www.marcopolohouse.org/whats-proposed.html
It's always been a controversial building architecturally, but then 80's post-modern does tend to date. It will of course be the second post-modern TV studio building to go in a year - TVam being the other.

Apart from QVC it seemed jinxed - it was home to both BSB and ONdigital

TVam hasn't "gone" as such has it? I thought it was just having the frontage redone and the eggcups were going to remain?

The post-modern bit has gone (or is in the process of going)

The rear - the old warehouse fronting the canal (which has the egg cups on) is staying