I found this great clip on my hard drive. I encoded this way back in 1999, it's not the best clip you will find on the net and the sound drops a few times but it's great to look back at all those old satelitte logos in the early 90's. I must try and find the original in which the trailers lasts for about 15 minutes.
I've got the 1994 version of that trailer too (and they still billed Astra's channel lineup as being available for 'less than the price of a good video recorder' then too - even though by then there was precious little available in English without a Sky subscription).
I don't know how many there were in total. They do still ocassionally have 'Astra Vision' promo channels appearing, but they are now cheap in-house continuous loop things rathern than being a short documentary with a gap between airings as the old ones were. I do know that there was a new version in 1996 (made by 'Concore Europe Films' just as they all were), don't know about after that. They had certainly been withdrawn by the end of 1998.
From what I remember there was several trailers made with different languages and like you mentioned, it was all done on a loop but the one I've got is very informative and you go behind the scenes at Astra.
I remember a very recent ASTRA promo which really was quite good.
There were numerous clips, and the first one involved a TV studio and a blue "beam" being transmitted to ASTRA, then the blue beam was sent to space and reflected off a Satellite, then there's a shot of the blue beam entering a satellite dish and it says "This is SES" - that one has a brilliant soundtrack and if anybody knows what the song is, I'd greatly appreciate it.
The next involved two computer animated satellite dishes describing (very basically and patronisingly) how satellite TV works, from inside a receiver. "Then, the picture goes out of here, and into your TV!"
There was another showing ASTRA innovations in a technological world of the future, with recipe consoles in the kitchen and video on demand. That was pretty cool too.
My favourite was the one with the blue beam. Does anybody have this?
From what I remember there was several trailers made with different languages and like you mentioned, it was all done on a loop but the one I've got is very informative and you go behind the scenes at Astra.
Ahh yes... I remember that one too. It tells you the optimal distance from Earth for geostationary satellites and so on, and about the protective foil they put on the satellites. I remember that one too.
They usually appear when ASTRA is launching a new satellite or something, but sadly, they rarely appear on analogue. There is a permanent ASTRAvision channel on 19,2 East Digital IIRC.
