@@gli7utubeo 21 pin scart, started in the early 80s. back then TV equipment had alsorts of different connections, but they all agreed to using the scart. Bi-directional, so it didn't matter which end you used, but cheap ones had no individual screening, so on TVs like panasonic, they had ghost pictures in the background. It is albeit extinct now, but some TVs still have a scart socket, but these new flat TVs were too thin for the socket.
@@chrisallan6069 And what's more they often interrupt programs at a vital moment of the plot so they can synch with all the advert breaks on the other channels.
We had a 2 week free trial from SKY which lasted 8 months. It was the first time I heard stereo tv when I connected the satelitte box to an old stereo system from the early 80's. MTV and Sky Movies sounded incredible on it
I miss the old days of satellite, used to be so much fun moving the dish to a different satellite and discovering what was on there. Even the early sky indents had such an air of excitement when compared to the 4 stuffy terrestrial channels. Its just not the same now.
Features such as this prove why the show is still relevant today - technological advancements. Had the show of still been running today we would have seen things such as Blu-Ray,HD TV, multi core CPUs, Tablet PCs, Camera Phones, Wireless Internet, USB Drives, etc, etc all demonstrated to the public ahead of release. Come on BBC stop giving us endless tripe on TV and BRING BACK Tomorrow's World!
Larry Bundy Jr I don't think they lasted long before BSB folded. one they were heavily invested in was "screensport". also "lifestyle" which lasted till 1993.
I got my first satellite dish in 1995, pointed at Sirius. It was there I saw my first hardcore porn film. Hardcore porn was banned in the UK back then and there was no Internet. I was 38 at the time!!
The two channels that were owned by WHSmith were Screensports and Lifestyle. Screensports merged with Eurosport in 1993 and Lifestyle shut down for good
You know that shop that sells glitter pens, computer magazines and ring binders? Well now they're doing TV! I wonder how many subscribers they got? Not many...
Problem with Astra is that you got sparklies when it rained snowed or hailstoned and I found that annoying. If you had an Amstrad receiver and dish, they were crap : it had horribly hissy Wegener 🐼 sound in mono and stereo audio modes (it didn't use official Wegener 🐼 circuitry to eliminate hiss and background noise on the Wegener 🐼 audio subcarriers), and would give sparklies, even in fine weather and this is down to a temperamental automatic frequency control circuit built in which would regularly drift off tune. If you had Pace Nokia NEC or any of the better brands, you wouldn't get sparklie pics in fine weather on a 60cm dish, however north of Birmingham, signal strengths did reduce a bit especially on the European focussed Astra transponders and the only way around that, no matter what brand of Astra satellite box that you had, was an 80cm dish antenna. My parents went for an 80cm Nokia Astra satellite dish and receiver in Rishton Lancashire and we got near 100% good sparklie free reception from Astra 1A and Astra 1B most of the time, apart from the heaviest rain hail sleet and snow when things would temporarily bomb out and become unwatchable with tons of sparklies. From Astra 1C and Astra 1D onwards the reception was largely excellent and relatively sparklie free because these satellites had much higher power and bigger European footprints with a much wider coverage of the United Kingdom, enabling reliable UK wide reception on a 60cm dish. UK Gold VH1 Bravo CMT Europe Sky One MTV Europe Lifestyle The Children's Channel Sky News and many other services plus the additional satellite radio services sounded great in Wegener 🐼 1 stereo sound too piped thru a HiFi system on stereo phono leads or fed to a good stereo television on SCART connection along with slightly better RGB picture quality. Wegener 🐼 1 noise reduction was rather like Dolby for tapes, the way it worked was quite clever, let me explain : The transmitted analogue FM sound was heavily compressed by the Wegener 🐼 1 noise reduction system before satellite transmission, and at the receiver end, the receiver circuitry would expand the compressed audio restoring the dynamic range minus the hiss and background noise giving a pleasing result, but cheaper Astra receivers without official Wegener 🐼 1 circuitry didn't sound quite as good either with a fair amount of hiss and noise present or still poor noisy audio quality.
My brother got BSB and a squarial back in 1989 soon after it launched. Probably sounds a bit naff now, but it was genuinely exciting to see satellite TV back then. Didn't take long to realise that most of the programming was old 70s shows like Target, before 70s TV became cult retro viewing. Like a lot of this stuff, we just take it all for granted now.
SCART was exceptional. You must be in the minority as SCART is widely lauded among professionals and was better than any system that existed outside western Europe.
Back when I used to charge for a satellite survey, because the dishes were big and line of sight had to be confirmed before committing to order the equipment. Back then it was expensive kit! Squarials were a funny old thing, and you could send messages to anyone's screen, like "going to be late for dinner". lol. Still fitting them today. I have seen many changes in 31 years!
Love the fact that at 2:00 Maggie asks a question to 'Robin' at Astra headquarters and there is absolutely ZERO delay. Who were they trying to kid. We can't even get that response time NOW in 2017 Bet he was in the next Studio at TVC
We had BSB! It was far better than early Sky. It only had 5 channels but the programming was much better thought out. In 1989 it had an electronic program guide on a scale we never saw again until Sky Digital appeared in 2001!
Gosh, back in the days when Scart leads were considered sophisticated. You have to have some sympathy for anyone who went fkr BSB. On paper it seemed the better option but BSB were run on a shoestring whilst Sky used Astra and they were owned by Rupert Murdoch so we're on a financially better position. It's been said that BSB were killed off by sky having exclusive rights to The Simpsons and Star Trek - The next Generation back in 1989 and as I recall BSB went out of business within a couple of years leaving a lot if people with a £250 lump of metal on the side of their house.
I always liked the idea of the squarial dish. Better than the Astra dishes you see on the side of the house. Always looked tidy and not like a tumour on the side of the house. Oh how we messed up that part of the satellite TV world.
Astra was the system that Sky use to carry their channels. BSB was "merged with" (more like bought out by) Sky to become B Sky B with the original BSB satellites being sold off to the Scandinavians and the BSB channels being replaced or moved over to Astra along with Sky. The WH Smith channels were Lifestyle (most memorable for naughty videos on the satellite jukebox) and Screensport (competitor to Eurosport) Astra launched a boatload over satellites serving the world, Sky use Astra 2 nowadays
Ah yes. I can see that now. They must have fed the signal through a framesync that freezes the picture when it degrades. Back in the day, if you did that at home you'd just see sparklies.
I remember that, we had one of the first Amstrad ones, won out of the Today Newspaper. Seemed so call at the time. Remember the channel line up as 1 Screensport, 2 RTL 2 (German -watched Der Preiss is Heiss and Tutti Frutti), 3 TV 3 (scrambled), 4 Lifestyle, 5 Childrens Channel, 6 Sat 1 (German), 7 TV 1000, 8 Sky Channel with DJ Kat and Punky Brewster), 9 Eurosport, 10 ???, 11 Filmnet (part scrambled) 12 Sky News, 13/14 ??, 15 MTV, 16 Sky Movies
There's Freesat, a free-to-air satellite provider owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 with no involvement from Sky whatsoever. Sky do, however, operate a rival service known as Freesat from Sky.
Astra was a medium powered 52dBW fixed satellite service (FSS) spacecraft with it's principal beam made to serve Western Central Northern and Eastern Europe at 19.2E. In 1991 Astra 1B joined Astra 1A in service but had a serious fault with it, it wouldn't stay fixed due to a thruster problem and drifted in and out of orbital position 19.2E causing sparklies on various transponders. In 1993 Astra 1C was launched into position at 19.2E and this had a significantly bigger European footprint with much bigger European coverage than Astra 1A and Astra 1B and this was followed by Astra 1D, the last of the analogue Astra satellites which couldn't be picked up easily by early Astra equipment unless you had a Frequency Expander box connected to your existing receiver and dish which piggy backed the Astra 1D channels over the Astra 1A band by selection, or could be picked up provided you had a more modern Astra receiver and dish with a 2Ghz capable tuner and 2Ghz capable LNB.
Interesting clip. I remember my Dad won a competition in Today Newspaper so we had it early on, remember all the german channels and other random stuff
The good old Amstrad 60cm dish and LNB on the roof, the blue cap on the LNB would crumble over time due to exposure to sunlight, a lot of people replaced the cap with a lid from a coffee jar after removing the paper insert from the lid. I worked for TAS starting in 1989 (Tele Aerials Satellite Ltd, later to be fully owned by Sky and called Sky In-Home Service) fitting these dishes amongst others. In Scotland the dish size was 80cm and the Amstrad ones had crappy brackets to secure them to the pole and they bent easily if over tightened and moved in the slightest of winds losing signal.
satellite TV began in Australia in 1995 with Galaxy, then Mr Murdoch came in with his Foxtel and Galaxy ended up going out of business as did other PayTV/satellite stations
The dishes must have been massive- if north of Manchester was a problem, Estonia was really out of the way. Unless Lithuania or Poland had satellite TV back then. Sweden, maybe?
@@anonUK The "north of Manchester" problem was simply due to the amount of power the satellite was outputting, later in the segment the man from Astra said that limitation was moved to the Scottish border due to the satellite being more powerful than expected. Here in the US there are two ways to receive satellite television. First you can watch the free-to-air channels with no subscription which are transmitted using the Fixed satellite service. This requires larger dishes, especially for C-Band reception. These channels are usually transmitted with wide angle and rather low power beams. You also have the Direct Broadcast Satellite Service which is designed for home reception and is subscription based. These satellites have tighter beams and more powerful transmitters allowing for smaller receiving dishes. Even ones that can receive multiple signals simultaneously are smaller than a meter in the largest direction unless you are in Alaska.
They were already working on it back then, so they'd probably be wondering why it took so long to take off! Amazing how these things always take so much longer than they need to in being deployed and adopted (financial reasons I guess) - 1989 and BSB are talking about HD... when did HD finally come to the UK, 2005 wasn't it?
I can tell you that the channels owned by WHSmith were screensport and lifestyle. Both channels seized in 1993, screensport merged with eurosport and lifestyle shut down for good and was replaced by a German channel called VOX.
The Dragon Killer Screensport merged with Eurosport actually and left Astra 1A transponder 1 for RTL-2 while Lifestyle closed completely and gave up Astra 1A transponder 5 to VOX. WHSmith gave up on television altogether too, they weren't seized at all by nobody. The two channels didn't last long following the move to Astra.
On the Astra system - Amazing how in 1989 we were able to talk to another country and get an instant reply from the other person yet today, it takes a presenter or news journalist a few seconds delay before getting a reply when asked a question, even if they are in the same country O.o why ??
Srsly ;-; You didn't noticed that it was cut they propobly had second reel recorded with tv footage and she was propobly not even on the phone look at her face 2:35 before cut also the way she ended conversation like she was talking to herself.
Afhjkdgf there were no sparklies because the signals from Astra were exceptionally strong in the south of the UK. They did however, weaken, the further north that you went increasing the chance of sparklies.
there are people who claim "back in the days everything was better" but honestly, 33 years ago the world didn't even have internet, and smartphones were a thing of sci-fi movies. then again.. people back then didn't know better and got excited by little things. these days kids grow up on their smartphones and computers consuming tons of information via shortened 1 min videos about the world each day. You can't impress them anymore because they have seen pretty much everything in these videos already
I had satellite TV from the mid 80's. The dish was about 1.8 meters in diameter and was steerable. It was mounted on two kerb stones on top of my garage. How the hell I got them up there I don't remember but they kept it pointing in the right direction for many years. I set up the same system for a pal in his place in Majorca. I flew there and the kit was shipped there by a couple of his employees. Forty years later and it's all done on broadband.
we got satellite tv roughly in '96 and winters was when the signal degraded in my area due to weather, we were customers to direct tv to about 2010 when my dad got sick and tired of the providers bs regarding payments, bills, fees, and other stuff they thought they can get away with
My first satellite dish a amstrad for 16 programs cost 1000 DM or 500 euros yesterday I ordered a satellite receiver with 1000 channels for 20 euros from Amazon
Does anyone else remember being a Sky Pioneer? I actually used that a couple of years back and the girl taking the call had absolutely no idea what in the hell I was talking about. To be fair she probably wasn't even born back then :-)
is it still possible to use Analog c /ku band satellite ? I want to buy this receiver www.amazon.com/dp/B07J4SNV87 its so cool its from 1989 and digital audio how does that work?
In your travels through the Tomorrow ' s World " stuff " did you come across a piece on a propeller for outboard / boat drive ? It both revolved & oscillated , for & aft from what i remember ?
The BBC did so seem to love BSB for some reason. I also recall some snobbery regarding the two systems. Of course the cheaper one won out. I remember the various dishes of both systems popping up on houses all over in the following couple years. I think the dish got much smaller when digital was introduced.
BBC liked BSB because they were part of the consortium which owned it. Sky was owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who would have loved to see the BBC closed down to give him complete control of television broadcasting
Jacana Productions no this wasn't DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite), DBS was used in the UK for BSB which beamed down mainly to the UK at very high power. Astra was an FSS Satellite (fixed satellite service) which means a satellite in a determined position fixed in geostationary orbit above the earth.
I think the Americans had sat TV back in the early '70s, and it's been in the UK since early '80s, but only nerdy sat enthusiasts were into it. In the late '80s, Murdoch cashed in on an unknown market, and gave us the Sky channels.
The consequences of this era still effect UK TV today. Under its franchise agreement SKY has to broadcast their channels from a satellite despite the fact that the technology has been overtaken by the Internet. It looks more silly year by year
But until reliable and more readily available broadband connections become available, and mobile signals are 100% available across the whole of UK (and it can be pretty patchy across the country in places), then online TV will remain a pipedream.
I still remember my neighbour pointing at his new BSB dish in 1990 and saying "you should get one of those, we've got about 10 channels now" and my dad said "nah, we're fine with the 30 we get on cable." My dad was savage af.
Problems with analogue catv is ; Lack of stereo sound on satellite channels, and those that did transmit stereo sound from satellite like MTV Europe Sky One Sky Movies Sky News The Children's Channel and Lifestyle all using 7.02 / 7.20 Mhz were often relegated to FM radio frequencies on the catv network which required your hifi system to be hooked up to cable tv to receive them in stereophonic sound from FM, No satellite radio stations like Opus Radio, Sky Radio, Radio Luxembourg, Quality Europe FM and others, Appalling picture quality being degraded by the processing and conversion of the services to a form suitable for catv redistribution, And weird chopping and changing where services shared catv channel slots ie so many hours of Screensport then a cable exclusive movie service mid evening.
