Tomorrow's World - Satellite Television - First Broadcast from Astra - 1989

[converter7]

'''All the way to the Scottish border,,,'

[BBC600]

Was this on cable or analog?

[freddielaker2]

I had a receiver in 1984 watching Eutelsat, Intelsat, Thor, so shome mishtake shomewhere!

Betzdorf wasnt even built then I dont think.....

[wallboyzx]

I don't see this catching on personally

[peterpeterxxo]

...and in 22years time, satellite tv will be in over 10million households in the uk.

[JacanaProductions]

This was DBS right, the small dishes. You could get one of those huge ones before I assume.

[berryje1964]

typical if you live up north you have to pay more, Thatcher's britain say no more !

[RussWWFC]

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

[AnthonyUK]

my parents had an 80cm dish system for astra and reception was great, largely sparklie free and very good pictures too with great panda 1 stereo sound via scart on the stereo tv

[Cintelo]

Aaah. Two competing satellite companies. Those were the days. Ironic now that BSkyB is such a monopoly it now needs to be split in two.

[MegaWayneD]

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!

[AnthonyUK]

@MegaWayneD BSB had superb picture quality and digital stereo sound to match with option to transmit 16:9 widescreen and the facility to go hi-def as well. Astra had fairish PAL pictures with sparklies present in cloudy skies/rain/snow and slightly compressed analogue FM stereo sound and no chance of widescreen or hi-def. BSB was better but the boxes only had 1 scart socket;the boxes should have had 2 scart sockets(1 RGB/1 for VCR's CVBS or S-Video selectable),stereo out and S-Video sockets too.

[playgirlc]

confused as satellite tv has been going since before than 1989......  unless i misunderstand something.....

[sdaonline]

@playgirlc it's the first broadcast from the astra 1a satellite

[theapeman10]

tomorrow's world was always great to look at and it just go's to show how dumbed down Tv is today in the UK. Even shows like the gadget show dumb down everything to simple product reviews.The whole of TV today in the uk is news,soaps, chat shows and reality shows. Even the science content has gone from BBc2. Why do we have to pay a license when the BBC aren't even providing education any more.Fuck the BBC.People learn by constant exposure to technology and we get dumb shit soaps like eastenders

[Markjuk]

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!

[AnthonyUK]

No it was like this 1 Screensport 2 RTL Plus 3 TV3 Sweden 4 Eurosport 5 Children's Channel/Lifestyle/JSTV(Later on Children's Channel and JSTV moved to Astra 1B channel 24 11.567Ghz/V PAL clear,encrypted for JSTV), 6 Sat1 7 TV1000 8 Sky Channel 9 3sat 10 Teleclub 11 Filmnet 12 Sky News 13 RTL-Veronique clear PAL for a year then when RTL4 came it partly scrambled it's transmissions in Luxcrypt to secure copyright,mainly english programmes, 14 Pro7 15 MTV Europe 16 Sky Movies

[RussWWFC]

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

[AnthonyUK]

Lifestyle was quite a pleasant channel to watch on Astra.

[Visonu]

This is from January 24th 1989

[Visonu]

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.

[AnthonyUK]

@Visonu Screensport sold out to TF1 and they merged with Eurosport effectively closing Screensport down in the process, and Lifestyle didn't survive long following the move to ASTRA1A.

[AnthonyUK]

Astra was better north of manchester on an 80cm dish sat system;it was quite sparkly on 60cm dish systems esp in bad weather/cloudy skies.

[jimmyass]

take it astra failed

[shteak]

@jimmyass

No.

[AidanLunn]

@jimmyass Astra didn't - BSB's Marco Polo did :)

[jimmyass]

@AidanLunn cheers yh a quick look at wikipedia confirmed it all for me.

[Kevo00]

Awesome little bit of Tomorrow's World...I think I actually remember watching that.

[Visonu]

The two channels that were owned by WHSmith were Screensports and Lifestyle. Screensports merged with Eurosport in 1993 and Lifestyle shut down for good

[olliedann]

Great clip.

Hmm. When Howard put his hand over LNB receiver, the picture didn't break up. Oops.

[sdaonline]

Ah, well it's hard to see on this compressed clip, but it sort of pauses and scrambles slightly.

[olliedann]

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.