Early Cable/Satellite TV thread

It happened at 1pm UK time on 10th May.

Here's an unusual video:











From 25 July 1992, when BBC1 showed the Olympic opening ceremony: http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0a95c98340ba44c4b6aaedb7a6398521

Was it usual to have a mix of languages (German/English) on one satellite feed at the time? Or is this likely to be two different feeds?
(Edit) It's two different feeds, as Noggin explains below.

I've just been reading about how some Americans picked up unscrambled European satellite feeds to watch the 1990 World Cup, on C-band dishes.

Yes - both PAL and MAC satellite broadcasts could carry multiple audio feeds (PAL had multiple subcarriers, MAC had enough data capacity) so that pan-European services could carry commentary in different languages.

Eurosport used to routinely carry multiple language feeds on their analogue Astra 1 service - you could chose which language you wanted by tuning to different audio carrier frequencies. The services on Astra 1 were aimed to France, Germany and the UK - so some sport channels had French, German and English language commentary. (ISTR Screensport did too?)

The BCH-1000 referred to in the test card was an early BTS 1" Eureka 1250 HDTV VTR, and would have been a source for HD-MAC broadcasts. The TV Sat and Telecom 2 satellites were both, I think, DBS satellites (like BSB's MarcoPolo, and the European Olympus test satellite).

MAC had a neat solution - similar to today's Audio Description on Freeview - that allowed a single full-bandwith stereo data feed to be used to carry programme sound, with multiple mono (either full or narrow band) commentary feeds to be broadcast, with the receiver mixing them together (to reduce the amount of data required)

Nowadays it is common for some pan-regional services to do this with both audio and subtitle streams - particularly for pan-Baltic and pan-Nordic services (though increasingly these are localised)

I remember Eurosport and Arte having multilingual audio on Astra 1.

What about the on-screen languages? You said you watched Albertville and Barcelona 1992 in HD widescreen. Were the broadcasts like the one in the video, with pres from different countries? (Message in English/ARD title card in German/BBC footage later.) Or was there a particular language that was preferred? Was it common to show presenters too?


The article about those Olympics by Dieter Hoehler is here:

- http://www.live-production.tv/case-studies/sports/brief-review-hdtv-europe-early-90%E2%80%99s.html


http://www.live-production.tv/sites/default/files/styles/original_image_with_copyright/public/Archive_09_Artikel_HDTV_Productionunit_MCU.jpg?itok=jzbOaBYk

And many channels used their audio subcarriers to carry radio services. The encryption didn't affect the audio so you could listen to them even if you didn't subscribe to the TV channel.


The ones that spring to mind are Virgin 1215 (the only place you could get it in stereo for a while of course) which was on Sky News, Sky Radio on Sky 1, and the BBC national stations which were spread across UK Gold and UK Living. IIRC some were in stereo, some in mono so 2 on one and 3 on the other
EDIT. In fact here's a list:
http://www.sat-net.com/listserver/sat-uk-tab/msg00338.html

The London Asian station Sunrise was also carried alongside one of the channels and was used to supply IRN bulletins to smaller radio stations. They inserted silences either side of the bulletins just on Astra to allow for easy opt outs/in

Simple - there was no in-vision presentation of any significance. Ignore the Des Lynam stuff on that recording - it is from a different, PAL analogue SD feed, not a 16:9 HD-MAC one.

From memory Alison Holloway (an early Sky presenter, now a Senior Producer in Entertainment shows in LA) was one of the English-language out-of-vision commentators.

I watched quite a lot of Barcelona '92 on the HD-MAC feeds (in SD on a 16:9 scan crushed RGB 4:3 CRT) and from memory when they were in a gap between live coverage they largely cut to a beauty shot of the Olympic flame with a music bed, then cut to the HD host broadcast footage as the event started. Note I wasn't watching them in HD, HD-MAC was backwards compatible with SD D-/D2-MAC so you could watch the broadcasts on an SD receiver (in my case a modified BSB box I re-programmed). HD-MAC effectively used 4:1, 2:1 and 1:1 interlace on a block-by-block basis and was able to send motion vectors in the data fields (which also carried audio) in H&V blanking to allow a receiver to do a reasonable reconstruction of an HD signal, from an SD analogue signal. However the processing artefacts in the SD signal weren't pretty...

I have dim recollections of possible seeing a studio on the Albertville coverage - but watched far less of that (and it could have been I saw a 4:3 studio on another channel on the same satellite)

That BBC VT clock is sweet as.

I had no idea this was possible on early satellites around 1990 – some fans in the U.S. saw the World Cup on four or five different European feeds. And Serie A too (on the RAI sat feed presumably) on a 10-foot dish. American TV didn't show all of the matches at the tournament.

How come the European feeds were available so far away? Were they sending them for overseas broadcasters to retransmit? (ITV Carousel says Canada's TSN took ITV's commentaries during that World Cup).

This was in Orlando:



It's not as exciting these days. ("The dodgy VPN is in place...")

Also, in 1990 the Chicago Tribune is merrily encouraging this creative approach – "U.S. fans with satellite dishes need only get the transponder numbers for TSN Canada. The Great White North`s version of ESPN will show all 52 matches" – something which Americans couldn't do today.