Early Cable/Satellite TV thread

From 1995, UKGold starts the day with its epic extended ident.



and the promo that went out pre-launch

Didn't realise it'd been going since 1992

The German Nickelodeon has an English audio track too. And Euronews. I'm sure there's a few more too.

I remember in the early days it shut down around 2000. I wonder why it closed down and why it came back.

UK Gold? Yes it was a joint venture between the BBC and Thames in their last year as an ITV company

Wasn't the original German Nickelodeon scrambled in a different form of Videocrypt?

I think it was but I'm sure there was a period where it was unscrambled as well, or maybe it just had certain hours unscrambled... I seem to recall it wasn't particularly secure either and it was fairly easy to crack.

According to wiki the original closed down due to weak advertising and the inability to compete against its more successful rival, Der Kinderkanal. It shut in May 1998.

I remember when it first appeared in the clear and sometimes you would get a montage of Nickelodeon ident's if VH1 Germany didn't switch over in time.

Here are the last moments of Nickelodeon Germany from 1998:

What happened with Nickelodeon Germany this first time round was that its cable slot was taken by Der Kinderkanal (KIKA), killing off a key distribution channel. There was a lot of controversy about the PSB Kinderkanal forcing a commercial channel out of the cable networks. Overnight, most of its audience was cut off from the channel, although I believe the channel survived on air on cable in North-Rhine Westfalia, where the channel was based.

Analogue cable only had limited capacity. The first version of Nick Germany took Arte's old daytime downtime (Arte used to start at 5pm), so Nick's cable feed switched to Arte at 4:59pm CET, although I seem to remember announcements being made that the channel continued on satellite beyond the 5pm cable cut-off.

Then in 1997, Der Kinderkanal started and timeshared with Arte, both on satellite and cable. Arte then started at 7pm (the axed 5pm-7pm slot were repeats anyway). This, I believe was in line with the French language version of Arte that started at 7pm at that time (during the analogue era, Arte was the same channel in Germany and France but with different soundtracks; it is now two different channels with different schedules).

In Germany, the analogue cable line-up was dictated by the Landesmedienanstalten, or state media authorities. Cable operators were forced to prioritise the PSB children's channel over the commercial children's channel.

In some states, capacity was found to reinstate Nickelodeon as a timeshare with VH-1 Germany, which switched at 8pm CET. (Increasingly, the Hyperband frequency range was being used to provide a few extra cable channel slots for analogue channels.) Certainly where I was at the time, this reinstatement happened weeks before Nickleodeon closed down. VH-1 Germany was expanded to fill the ex-Nickelodeon time.

English language on 19.2E - all news:
Al Jazeera English HD
BBC World News (also in HD)
Bloomberg
CGTN
CNBC Europe
CNN International
DW-TV English
France 24 English
NHK World
RT English
Sky News Int'l
TRT World (HD)
BBC World Service Radio

+ English soundtracks on
Nickelodeon Germany (SD/HD)
Nickelodeon Austria (SD/HD) - partially varying schedule to Germany.

Euronews is no longer offered in English on 19.2.

Oh, you're right, they seem to have split off into separate language versions, with only the French being at 19.2. That must have happened VERY recently, the multi-language version was still there a couple of weeks back! I'll miss the commentary-free audio track on Hotbird

Does anyone remember the canal channels? One i recall was a Spanish kids channel called Minimax and was scrambled in Nagravision and also had FTA slots.