History of Home Satellite TV

the early history of satellite television and direct-to-home satellite broadcasting is not the story of big business and high-tech industry as it was planned to be it is the story of how ordinary Americans backyard experimenters and garage inventors jumped the gun on corporate America and started the satellite revolution years before it was envisioned mark long picks up the story direct to home satellite broadcasting is not a new idea mathematician and science fiction author arthur c clarke first proposed the use of satellites for the broadcasting of radio on TV signals way back in 1945 a central part of his discovery was the use of a unique orbit located some 22,000 miles above the earth's equator Mr Clarke wrote of his revolutionary idea in an article entitled extraterrestrial relays a body in such an orbit he said would revolve with the earth and would thus be stationary above the same spot on the planet it would remain fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere today all communication satellites use this principle on the 20th anniversary of arthur c clarke discovery nasa launched earlybird the world's first geostationary communications satellite early bird had the capacity to transmit 240 voice circuits or a single channel of black and white television soon after early bird was followed by other international satellites for the first time creating a global satellite network at first satellite operators had to use extremely large antennas typically 40 to 120 feet in diameter to receive these international satellite signals back then only national governments broadcasters and a few other groups could afford the large cost of installing and operating these mammoth earth stations it wasn't until 1975 that the first private individual attempted to receive satellite television via a backyard dish at that time India was using an experimental NASA satellite to transmit television programs to remote Indian villages a young BBC transmitter manager learned that the satellite was beaming signals not only over the Indian subcontinent but also to locations as far away as England in December of 1975 Stephen Buerkle used a five foot dish made of window screen to receive his first satellite TV signals what's more he built the electronic circuitry for the receiver on his kitchen table his pioneering efforts proved that individuals with modest resources could bring satellite TV signals into their homes after maybe three months of experimentation and not knowing what time the transmissions were or exactly being able to locate precisely the satellite location I found a signal there it was it was the AI are all India Radio and crest on the screen a test card and some program material the first satellite TV that I had ever seen and I was absolutely knocked out you could just about make it out in amongst the noise so that I was really bitten by the bug then and that led me onto to figure that maybe if I can receive UHF from a satellite that's beaming at India maybe I should have a go at some of this wonderful microwave stuff like four gigahertz and so following the successful launch of the first US domestic satellites in 1974 in 1975 home box office became interested in using communication satellites to send programming to cable TV systems throughout the country I called the meeting with HBO and with RCA America almond with that time Monty Rifkin who headed up ATC December of 74 timing headquarters and said hey I think we got a movie I mean we can price our stations 10 meters at what we said then 65,000 I think we sat down which was dramatic they come from 250 to a hundred to sixty-five we didn't know how to build 65 but we figured if we could get some volume going we'd come down the learning curve and sure enough in the spring of 75 HBO agreed to lease some transformers from RCA and in the September 75 I went on the air with the thriller from Manila we installed for us 10 meter TV arrows in Jackson Mississippi and in in Florida leave Fort Pierce HBO made its first satellite TV broadcast on September 30th 1975 when it broadcasts the Thrilla in Manilla the championship boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali soon thereafter HBO began making regular use of satellites for broadcasting programming to their affiliate stations throughout the country Stanford professor Taylor Howard heard about the early HBO transmissions and decided to build his own private receiving station in July of 1976 he pointed his dish in the direction of what he thought was the RCA satellite well I was using satellites for something different we had a group at Stanford that was using one of the in sets to relay weather data from Antarctica to the Jamestown Earth station in California and then we took it over telephone lines to Stanford where we were trying to develop synoptic weather maps of at arctica and one of the graduate students involved in that program came to me one day and he said you know there's video on one of the satellites out there so what do you mean video I need several pictures so he said he was down at Jamestown and saw this so I I went home and I had a 15-foot dish left over my amateur radio moonbounce days and I build up a receiver out of test equipment and lo and behold there was HBO and I didn't know what it was I just knew I had a picture and I remember the first picture very well because I finally found the satellite in the sky and at that time there was only one and there was only one transponder active on it so it was the 15 foot dish it was pretty hard to find so I finally found this and it was this all red screen and my pictures weren't very good I had a home-built low-noise amplifier and everything else was kind of homebuilder thrown together and on this all red screen I could tell there was some letter white lettering kind of shimmering there so I sat in a chair just like I am now and back from the screen they moved the chair back and forth until I was about the right distance and finally I was able to read the lettering that said attention all earth stations and I was hooked I mean it was hopeless after that here's another kind of television story now how far some folks will go to watch their favorite programs Scott Osbourne which was tiny out on a long way from nowhere to pin back this special report the next major step in the history of DBS was publicity Bob Cooper the PT Barnum of the early years of satellite TV was responsible for introducing millions of Americans to the technology in October of 1978 he wrote an article for TV Guide which talked about a satellite receiving system he hadn't stolen his home the year before at any rate at the article appeared in TV Guide and got a lot of mail more than 10 thousand pieces of mail in about 10 days it dribbled in for months thereafter but the mailman got noticed very well because you'd bring in literally sacks full of mail for the whole three or four day period there were kind of peeked you know and then fell off to where he could carry it in his hands and every letter had the same basic request where do I get one of these Bob decided to write back and let people know that he had put together a booklet that would answer their questions we sent all these letters out and it wasn't but a week later that we started getting checks for $7.50 coming back hundreds thousands of these checks came back and suddenly I was in the publishing business which was totally unexpected this booklet gave birth to a new industry composed of self-taught inventors and entrepreneurs rather than engineers and corporate giants recognizing that this industry desperately needed technical information Bob decided to publish a magazine and several technical manuals these included coops satellite Digest and technical manuals written by experimenters such as Taylor Howard Oliver Swan and Robert Coleman I figured if Taylor will tell Robert Coleman something he's discovered then why shouldn't we tell everybody else too and that's what the early couple of years of coop satellite Digest was whatever somebody discovered good bad or indifferent we published it because it was the spreading of information and it's sped up it's sped up I think the maturing process of the of the home satellite industry Bob also founded a series of trade shows which served as an indispensable training ground for manufacturers technicians and sales personnel the infant industry became so successful that by 1986 more than 1 million American homes had satellite dishes suddenly satellite TV had become a force to be reckoned with as the fledgling industry neared maturity its struggle became one of legitimacy the capability of turning each box on and off independently if you don't pay your bill the program supplier will turn that box off there's nothing you can do about programmers began scrambling their channels and intended to deny dish owners access calling them pirates even though the satellite industry's trade association was ready to pay for the programming uh $10 for the first scramble channel and 695 for each additional scramble channel always made it very clear on is a very important point that we were willing to pay for the programming that was delivered to us especially the pay TV program movies he said we are not pirates vacuum the Boy Scouts we have another means of technology and port means it serves rural Americans principally it can also serve suburban urban America the wide chance for visited technology and is the visionary Buckminster Fuller once pointed out sometimes it's the little guys who can do the things that big corporations and government agencies are unable to accomplish soon thousands of these little guys all across America stood up and participated in one of the more remarkable grassroots movements in modern US history mark long was one among many rural Americans who tried to gain some support among the nation's lawmakers in the spring of 1983 he met with the future US vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore jr. to ask his Tennessee congressman to help in the fight to legalize home satellite TV reception rumors cable consumer and as a constituent who was involved in the satellite earth station industry installing dishes in the rural communities of Tennessee he recognized that I had a problem that really affected all of his constituents because many of the people that live in the district that he represented at that time were rural people and they had no other way to gain access to programming the satellite TV revolution was a way that rural Americans could become first-class media citizens and he immediately identified with a problem and true to his word he made considerable effort on the part of the industry he first came to our trade show in 1983 and gave a keynote address then went back to Washington DC to begin investigating the problems and possible solutions which later came about through the adoption of the 1984 cable legislation which legalized the private ownership and reception of satellite television you know there was something really electrifying about that first meeting with Congressman Gore I've never gone to talk to a governmental representative before when I walked in that office after five minutes I thought that the congressman really understood our problems that he went from listening to making comments to making commitments in just a few minutes time and this is something that I was totally unprepared for that I my my view of what Congress was was people that talked a lot and deliberated and really thought out decisions and they weren't quick to making judgments but he immediately understood our problems and immediately made a commitment to do something about it and this was something that totally flabbergasted me at the time something that everybody in the satellite industry should remember measures through the effort of Al Gore jr. and other key legislators such as Barry Goldwater Billy Towson and Bill Waxman the public's right to access satellite TV programs finally became legalized to keep satellite television programs flowing to earth station owners are really based on a similar principle this country can only benefit from an open unencumbered free flow of information to all its people whether they live in cities or in rural America whether they watch cable television or depend on satellite signals D collage ironically with the launch of America's first DBS satellites the nation's cable TV programmers became home satellite TVs biggest beneficiaries and the c-band satellite revolution became but a footnote in history but a footnote testifying to what ordinary people can accomplish when they put their minds and their will to the task you you

Channel: David Shelburne

Views: 228,983

Keywords: Home satellite TV history, Mark Long, Bob Cooper, Arthur C. Clarke, Taylor Howard, Albert Gore, S.P.A.C.E. Satellite Association, SPACE-STTI Satellite Shows, Coop's Satellite Digest, Sid Topol - Scientific Atlanta, Stephen Birkill - First private dish owner, Satellite Television

Id: cWpLiMMQxcM

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 15 2014