Rainbow, but not rainbow

In the early analogue days you'd often have as much as 3 or 4 channels sharing a transponder, only broadcasting for a few hours a day. Obviously cheaper for all the parties involved than having it to themselves.

Quite a lot of channels only started up in the evening as it was cheaper to do so and also to timeshare between other services, there was only a finite amount of space on the satellite (as they were all also being used for German channels) at 19.2° East. This issue was solved when Sky Digital came along as it used a newly launched set of satellites at 28.2° East.

Of course back in the analogue days you quite often had shed load of channels timesharing, one extreme example was about six services I believe on the same transponder which includes Sky Sports 2 and some other services.

There were probably initially only about 2 24-hr channels, Sky One was one and I think the other at the time would have been Sky News. While others were added eventually, the bulk of the other services were split.

You had a split of children's channels in the daytime and general entertainment after 7pm. Nickelodeon and the first incarnation of the Paramount Channel are the best known example of this (and also The Children's Channel and Family Channel, which was relatively unique as they swapped over at 5pm). Fox Kids according to the table on Wiki timeshared with Sky Two as well at some point.

Everything else just sort of crammed on where they could.

JSTV was another example. It shared with TCC and later CMT. I'm guessing that the prices of carriage spaces were sky-high

Sky One wasn't 24 hours, I've seen footage of it sharing with "The Arts Channel" in its early days, there's footage of them closing down into the 90s too (though I imagine it's likely they didn't share the transponder with anyother channel at that point). I think MTV Europe was 24 hours though.

Edit: TV Ark has a video of a handover from Sky Channel (with the short lived Astra launch ident, so must be from the very early Astra days) to The Arts Channel, complete with non-sync cut: https://www.tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=60200

Edit: And from 1992, a closedown from Sky One into TV Asia, so they were still clearly transponder sharing by then:

Its strange to think in this multi-channel, multi-platform era that barely 25 years ago channels had to share. Here's a trip down memory lane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VkTwSdr0V0

Sorry, I meant Sky One in its later years in the 1990s it was primarily 24hrs, if it wasn't by 1993 it wasn't far off by I think 1995?. Of course prior to it being Sky One it would have only been part time broadcasting and probably shared its transponder, of course back when the parent company lost money like there was no tomorrow...




Another one of those "that's what it was at the time" situations. Bit like when you watch old clips of now disgraced personalities who are clearly popular, well in fashion and in demand, but looking from a modern viewpoint you think "pervert" or whatever. Have to remember they weren't seen as a pervert then.

Less than that, was still plenty of channel sharing into the early 00s, on analogue at least. Of course by then they were touting extended hours and separate channels for those services as a reason to go digital by then.

On/ITV Digital had a few timeshares too, the various Carlton channels for example, then Discovery Kids & Wings after they'd closed down. Always seemed a bit odd for them to have Kids & Wings, but not the main Discovery channel.

I find that music creepy as hell for some reason.

To be honest its one of those things that's gone full circle. It was common in the Sky Analogue days and now we have Freeview which practices the exact same thing.

But of course the bitrate keeps falling on Freeview to cram more services in. Which wasn't an issue on Sky Analogue. It can be on Sky Digital but that's normally the decision of the broadcaster, not a limitation of space. I dare say Astra 28.2 has bucketloads of space and can hold effectively more transponders per satellite than the old satellites could, so you didn't have to launch a new satellite and be limited to eight transponders or whatever it was on 19.2. Can't remember how it was done for 28.2, compression somehow?

Rainbow was shown in the 6AM slot on UK Gold in 92 and 93 - the very first programme of the day. I have a tape somewhere with a few episodes, with startups.

IIRC the episodes were the ones originally shown from 89 to 91.

Yes compression is the basis of digital TV - MPEG encoding reduces the bit rate and therefore bandwidth to a fraction of what it would be. Then made even more economic by multiplexing - combining multiple services into one data stream.


There are 3 satellites currently at 28.2e, they don't necessarily have more transponders than the older ones, Astra 2G has about 30. They are limited by the frequencies they can use - KU Band 10.7 to 12.75 GHz. It depends how they use that, how many physical transponders the satellites have and how they divide it between them.

Here's a list of what's transmitting at 28.2e. You're right thee is lots of space, although you'll notice some transponders are empty, that'll either be because they're broken or been taken out of service for some reason, or they've just been vacated and not re occupied yet. There is also a lot of space for feeds, particularly at the higher frequencies. I'm not sure what Astras strategy is for this, whether they can't fill it all with broadcast however some of this is on extended KU band so not able to be received by some domestic receivers. Being designed for direct to home it is high powered and therefore good for feeds - the trucks can find it easily and it gives a good receive margin

https://www.lyngsat.com/Astra-2E-2F-2G.html

There's nothing inferior about 19.2e, Astra have 4 satellites there currently and there's just as much space as 28.2
https://www.lyngsat.com/Astra-1KR-1L-1M-1N.html

I don't know how many transponders it had at the end of analogue, but the first satellite there Astra 1a had 16 and IIRC they then launched 1B, 1C and 1D for analogue at 19.2E so at least 100 transponders. Astra 1E was the first launched specifically for digital

And that's the case with a few Freeview channels now, most well known being Cbeebies and BBC4. It's a lot easier to do digitally as its essentially just reconfiguring a multiplex, switching off one data stream and replacing it with another and sending out new metadata.


In the analogue days it could be quite complicated. Eurosport shared its transponder with the Quantum shopping channel overnight. But because Eurosport was up linked from one place and Quantum another there was apparently a complicated conference call between uplink sites, Astra and the channels when it was switched. At the changeover point there was a brief snatch of static as one uplink was cut and the other then switched on