Square Peg: the Dream of British Satellite Broadcasting - Episode One 

Thanks for this! I was one of the children who appeared in the launch advert for BSB. We were not paid for this we were simply children of families who lived in the street they filmed the advert in. The camera crew spent the day filming a man in a hedgehog suit (if I remember correctly) crawling across the road. At the end of the day's filming, the crew asked families in the street if they would allow their children to run down the street so they could "calibrate their cameras". When the trailer was launched, there was no sign of the hedgehog but my friends and I were running down the street instead...Leicester Road in Lewes East Sussex! Leicester Road had been chosen as it was in a conservation area meaning no Sky satellite dishes were on the front of the houses to spoil the shot!

France was so far behind, we had 4 channels, TF1, A2, FR3 and Canal + until 1987 with the addition of La Cinq, M6 and Arte by 1993. But programmes were disappointing on the last 3. La Cinq, Berlusconi's station, failed miserably in 1992, M6, an MTV clone, was only showing music videos (and little else) and Arte, a Franco-German joint venture, was high-end culture, mostly broadcasting documentaries. And all terrestrial stations. Canal +, launched in 1984, was an expensive terrestrial pay subscriber TV-service so many French households were still relying on the first 3 channels for entertainment. In the early 1990s, living in rural France, we could access digital satellite TV via a B-Sky-B subscription package but this was very much a niche market for retired British expats and had to wait until mid-1996 to early-1997 for CanalSatellite (CSN), Télévision Par Satellite (TPS) and ABSat, 3 French consortium companies to offer similar services to a French audience, 7 years after Sky first broadcast satellite TV in the UK! So late in the game!

Round the corner from me there's a house that still has a Squarial on the wall. I like to think they're living in that alternative universe, still enjoying Jupiter Moon and Up Yer News....

We Poles only had two channels throughout the 70's and 80's. Launching a satellite that could broadcast the five extra channels we got thanks to the Geneva agreement would've bankrupted the TVP and Polish Radio in itself.

BSB channels might contender for the worst TV logos ive ever seen

Oh I remember BSB very well got me in to Satellite TV back in the early 90s as a teen (parents went for Sky/Astra) but remember the joining pf BSB. BSB did however have the better pic.

The D-MAC stipulation is the one overriding thing that cocked it all up. We can say "They shouldn't have been so relaxed about working on it", but even when everything else was going as planned, being lumbered with the task of making this then-useless technology useful slowed them down. BSB were screwed from the start, its almost like the IBA actively *wanted* them to fail.

Beautiful 💗

Was the BSB channels free like Sky on ASTRA at the same period ?

There were too many restrictions placed on them by the utter incompetence that was the IBA.

8:33 Sky Kids would finally launch in 2023

This is a brilliant introduction to a brilliant series. I personally feel that the Club of 21 could have worked if they'd spread out the shares out a bit more. Maybe give 25%-40% to the BBC, the rest to Granada, Anglia, Virgin, Thorn EMI and others. It's a pity non of the other ITV regions got on board, like Central or TVS, the latter would have had deep pockets at the time too.

Alan Bond… as sung about by Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson. Superb video as always :)

As Alan Partridge would say: Can I just shock you? I rather like Jupiter Moon. But then I like niche stances.

Damn Alan Sugar

😃😃😃😃😃😃

Ever thought of doing a film on the REDIFFUSION cable network. The first cable service??

Reall

how are you spelling that one guy from the first sattelite bid (sounds like robert holdsthecourt?)

Your voice sounds a bit grainy.