The end of MAC

It looks like the very last regular MAC broadcasts are to be made very soon.

As far as I know, D2-MAC is the only MAC-system still in use and it is now only used on three Danish channels broadcasting on the Thor satellites: DR2, TV3 and TV3+.

These broadcasts are coming to an end in this year. DR2 will finish on July 1 and i suppose the TV3 channels will end at the same time. The closing down of the analogue broadcasts is made a few months after the launch of Danish DTT in April this year.

As far as I'm concerned, this will also be the very end of analogue satellite broadcasting for the Nordic countries.

For those not familiar with MAC: It was a broadcasting standard with several variants considered better than the PAL system. One of them (D-MAC) was used by the British BSB service in the early '90s. After the closedown of the BSB satellite service, the D2-MAC variant was widely used in the Nordic countries througout the '90s and in the early '00s.

This is an event almost as sad as the passing of the last DTH example of VideoCrypt encryption in 2002...

Not MAC-related, but one thing I never got was why TV4 Sweden broadcast in analogue PAL on Thor 2 (0.8W) for a good few years (2001-2004 if memory serves). Surely this was never designed for DTH reception since it was the only PAL channel on the satellite, and PAL is not generally used in the Nordic countries?

Oh well, it allowed me to record Prisoner for a good few years, and I still mourn it's loss.

Nice to know that there still are a few analogue satellite enthusiasts out there apart from myself.

I'm quite certain it was for DTH-reception, but I don't know why they didn't switch. Perhaps the receivers were dual standard? Since most people could get the terrestrial signal, perhaps an analogue satellite signal wasn't needed by more than a few tens of thousand homes.

But your dates should be right, old press releases say they moved from Sirius to Thor II on June 1, 2001 and that they finally left analogue March 30, 2004 since it wasn't commercially viable to broadcast the signal to so few homes.

PAL and D2MAC was used along with each other for some time during the 90s. I'm not sure if D2MAC was ever used for FTA signals, except for a short period where Kanal 5 broadcast D2MAC in the clear (they were forced too scramble the signal too later on).

D2MAC was used FTA on TDF1 and TVSat for the French and German state channels in the early 90s. Both satellites carried HD-MAC (in the D2MAC not DMAC flavour) for the Albertville and Barcelona Olympics - I watched them on a modified BSB receiver and a scan crushed monitor (to get as near to 16:9 as I could) in RGB!

Wimbledon was also broadcast in HD-MAC on Olympus - but this was always encrypted.

I suspect that TV4 was PAL because it was cheaper - many satellite receivers were dual standard, and if you were FTA there was less need for D2MAC (which offered better quality encryption than Videocrypt and other composite encryption schemes) Scandinavia is PAL terrestrially - so all the TVs will have had PAL decoders in them. Some of the D2MAC channels exploited the 16:9 compatibility of the format - ISTR that TV1000 used to transfer films using BSBs 16:9 Rank Cintel Telecine (which was one of the few 16:9 installations in the early 90s.) Channel Four also used to use it ISTR - and it was moved to Sky when MarocPolo House was de-rigged.

I think I'm right in saying that the Thor satellites are in fact the MarcoPolo birds of BSB which were sold off and renamed.

That sounds about right to me.

Unlike the namesake building in Battersea, you won't find QVC in one half, and an abandoned DTT platform in the other, though.

The first Thor satellite was Marcopolo 2, but the Thor satellites I referred to were Thor II and Thor III, which doesn't have anything to do with BSB (DR2 and TV3 on Thor II and TV3+ on Thor III). The former BSB satellites were used for Scandinavian channels during the '90s, but were taken out of service in 2002/2003.

(In Sweden you will find the most successful pay DTT platform in the world, but that's another story)

The introduction of D2MAC on wider front wasn't a cheerful one. In the autumn of 1995, Jan Stenbeck (sometimes called a Murdoch wannabe) and his company Kinnevik advertised cheap discs that would give you access to PAL versions of all the major Swedish commercial channels (TV3, TV4, TV5, TV6 and ZTV) for free from the Tele-X and Sirius (ex Marcopolo 1) satellites.

But those who had bought these discs would soon find them self tricked because a few months later, Kinnevik decided to change from PAL to D2MAC and encrypt their channels. This would mean that those who had gotten used to TV3, TV6 and ZTV would have to buy new set-top-boxes and subscribe.

Kanal 5 (ex-TV5) had trouble with copyright owners since their PAL FTA broadcasts were available to all of Europe for free, but were actually only intended for Sweden. As an action against this they also switched D2MAC and eventually scrambled the signal (1997, I think) making the PAL-boxes only being useful for one channel, TV4, wich almost everybody could get terrestrially.

Yep - I saw that there was a pay-TV DVB-T platform when I was in Stockholm earlier this year. However the UK is apparently leading the world in DTV take-up - with 70% penetration, with no other European country above 50% and the US only at 55%?

(Freeview has to be the most popular DTT platform - in take-up per home terms - in the world at the moment?)