Satellite TV 1985

That might also explain why there was so little audience share.

I wonder why in 1989 there closed Premier and kept HVC?

someone mentioned it was in the clear on this forum and i posted below what was said


http://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/topic/293-tele-club/

Many thanks - I have been scouring the satellite frequency lists on Lyngsat and also printed media i.e What Satellite. I watched Tele-Club first in 1988 when it was only one of a handful of channels, it used to broadcast from THE I say THE, because there was only the one that I know of - Eutelsat - at that time; it was shown in the clear, but later scrambled in the old "wobbly" type Film Net encryption. I had a decoder (big box), for Film Net and also for Premier that was broadcast off of Intelsat, these are pre-Astra days, Sky channel also came along (as did Super Channel), but it wasn't owned by Murdock then, two enterprising ladies set up a studio in an office in London and broadcast the Sky channel from there, it was a bit like the old Live TV, UK Cable channel. I live very near to where High-Tec Extravision had their work shops and used to go there the chat to the then hackers, and purchase my equipment for viewing, Chris, I can't remember his surname owned the company - I think he is in prison at present, because laterly he allegedly marketed Sky analogue hack cards and was eventually prosecuted - he may be out now or has escaped - I'm not absolutely sure, shame really, he gave a lot of people, a lot of fun. Although he probably made a mint - good luck to him.

[quote="623058" pid="863487I wonder why in 1989 there closed Premier and kept HVC?[/quote]

Here's the story from the horse's mouth - I was Controller of Programmes at the Cable Authority from 1987 - 1991. When cable began in the late 80s, it had been anticipated that cable operators would emulate ITV by being programme producers. That certainly was the case in the beginning. Croydon Cable operated a local channel, CrystalVision; Swindon Cable had a local channel that included shopping programmes; Clyde CableVision and Aberdeen Cable both had large departments making daily news and magazine programmes, local sport and features; Windsor Cable produced local documentaries, and Ealing Cable set up an Asian channel - Indra Dhnush - and a cheap 'n' cheerful channel showing movies; Home Video Channel.

As cable progressed - much, much slower than anticipated as a result of the difficulties of building the systems and dealing with road reinstatement; tree root damage; and persuading other utilities to re-route cables - most of these fell by the wayside and rather than be a combination of programme provider and programme distributor, the cable companies opted to be straightforward telecoms operators and left the creation of content to others. The boss of Ealing Cable, however, hung on to his two channels. Both were distributed on low-band U-Matic tapes to cable operators, who had dedicated banks of players that could play the channels out on a semi-automated system. Indra Dhnush and HVC simply purchased movies (as cheaply as possible); made copies and sent these plus a paper schedule to the operators. Between movies there were gaps. Some cable operators filled these with menu captions, or a simple 'HVC continues shortly' style caption. Others just let colour bars go out. Of course programme listings didn't appear in satellite magazines - they weren't on satellite, after all. But the listings did appear in Cable Guide.

Eventually, the two channels were sold. HVC went to one of its rivals, Prem1ere, who were happy to run it for a decent interval before they gave up and sold it on. Prem1ere couldn't fight Sky Movies and eventually closed. Indra Dhnush was sold to two businessmen who'd been at Harvard. The problem was that it wan't really a channel - just a warehouse of U-matic tapes in south London. By this time, the Cable Authority had been amalgamated with the IBA to become the ITC and I had left. The Ealing boss approached me to ask if I could go with Indra Dhnush as its Managing Director to make it look more of a 'going concern'. I agreed and set about transforming it from a warehouse of tapes into a proper channel, renaming it AsiaVision in the process. We built our own studios and playout and switched from U-matic to S-VHS tapes with our own duplication facility, all based in a rather nice townhouse in Kensington. When the channel was finally sold to an American company, it ran all day with proper interstitials, trails, continuity and selected soaps, quizzes and documentaries from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The early days of cable were exciting, to be sure. In 1989 I produced for the Cable Authority a 15 minute promotional documentary that crystal-gazed into the broadband future. It was fronted by Tony Blackburn, and in it we accurately predicted most of the things that people now take for granted via the Internet (like home shopping, home banking, email, file transfers, home medical diagnosis) - only we had no idea that the internet would ever exist!

Confused: by pass

Chris Carey had been one of the Radio Caroline DJs and was later with 208 radio Luxembourg and Radio Northsea International as 'Spangles Muldoon'. He went on to set up the hugely successful pirate Radio Nova in Dublin. Then he set up Hi-Tec Extravision and launched Radio Nova International as one of the first satellite radio stations. (I read the news on opening day and did a few shows back then). He was prosecuted for selling illegal cards and jailed. he escaped but was tracked down to New Zealand and was returned to jail. Whilst in prison he suffered a stroke, and when he was released continued to run his business although with rather less energy but just as much ambition. While setting up Radio Nova in Spain in 2008 he suffered another stroke, this time fatal.

I re-read Tony post, I understand now., So some where between 1989 and 1992. The new owners brought HVC.

I do know the person in control was Chris Yates:

Thank you for your post Tony, very helpful.

What an insight! Thanks Tony.

Do you possibly know of any other channels which were played out in that way?

Some have suggested that the version of TCC which continued on some Cable systems (after the Satellite version gave way to TV Travel Shop), which consisted of a month's worth of programmes and trails (which never were more specific than 'Tomorrow', not giving a specific day or time) was just a series of tapes which Flextech provided so as to fulfill their outstanding contractual commitments.

I think I'm right in saying that The Box was generated locally by each cable company up to the launch of digital cable?

I suppose this question possibly fits here as well - on YouTube there are a couple of examples of advert breaks from UK Gold and Bravo (amongst others) where the local company briefly 'opted out' of a station break with their own adverts. Were these always run in place of a trail? How were they triggered?

Originally Bravo! was delivered on U-matic tapes, as was Westminster Cable's Arabic Channel and the religious channel Vision. I briefly worked for United Programming on a project to move Bravo! and The Discovery Channel to satellite, which we did.

Some of the bigger cable companies opted out of some channels to insert local commercials. CNN provided local 'windows' to do that, although it all went pear-shaped when Westminster Cable inserted a commercial for a local Kebab Shop halfway through a live speech by the U.S. President.... I can't remember how the breaks were triggered - presumably using some simple automation since all playout was analogue and tape-beased in those days. From what I can remember, CNN, TCC, Super Channel, Lifestyle, Screensport all provided opt-out points for commercials.

Gold gold gold, to improve the history pages.

Yes, the cable head ends had the equipment to provide The Box to it's customers, which of course meant that you did actually have a good chance of getting your selection played in those days! I remember hearing that the equipment used was made in the US so was all NTSC, thus the picture quality of The Box wasn't that great as it was all standards converted.


I seem to remember from my days working on a certain satellite channel that there were specific trails for cable opts, I can't remember how they were triggered, if they were at all.

UKTV output seperate versions of some channels for cable at one point, I think was mainly used to show promos for Front Row or the equivalent. Sky also had (and might well still have) a separate cable version of some channels, presumably with more promos for Sky Digital!

Where the channel came from is irrelevant to the ratings, the fact is that very few people had cable in the first place

Yep - The Box was originally NTSC based. AIUI the videos were burned to NTSC laser discs (for random access) rather than being recorded to tape. This meant that in Europe quite often the videos had been mastered and supplied to The Box in PAL, converted to NTSC for playout, and then the final channel converted back to PAL for transmission. Didn't do much for the picture quality - and the converters weren't exactly top-of-the-range Alchemists I suspect...



I've got memories of both an band in-audible tone-based system and a VBI-based system being used to trigger breaks - but I can't remember which channels used which.

Sky certainly have multiple versions of some of their channels - Sky News has a couple of variants ISTR. I think there may have been multiple Sky Sports variations at one point as well? (But SD not HD?)