Satellite TV - The First Fifty Years
Satellite TV - The First Fifty Years
By Rachael Stillman and Gary Davis
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Satellite TV. Satellite TV may seem quite new, but its
history actually spans over a fifty year period.
The original concept of satellite television is often attributed
to writer Arthur C. Clarke, who was the first to suggest a
worldwide satellite communications system. Funding for satellite
technology in the U.S. began in the 1950s, amidst the space
race, and the Russian launching of the satellite Sputnik in
1957.
The first communication satellite was developed by a group of
businesses and government entities in 1963. Syncom II orbited at
22,300 miles over the Atlantic; the first satellite
communication was on July 26, 1963, between a U.S. Navy ship in
Lagos, Nigeria and the U.S. Army naval station in Lakehurst, New
Jersey.
Overloaded land based distribution methods had the telephone
companies utilizing satellite communication way before the
television industry even came into the picture. In fact, it was
not until 1978 that satellite communication was officially used
by the television industry.
In 1975, RWT's co-founder and BBC transmitter engineer Stephen
Birkill built an experimental system for receiving Satellite
Instructional Television Experiment TV (SITE) transmissions,
beamed to Indian villages, from a NASA geostationary satellite.
Birkill extended his system, receiving TV pictures from
Intelsat, Raduga, Molniya and others. In 1978, Birkill met up
with Bob Cooper, a cable TV technical journalist and amateur
radio enthusiast in the U.S., who invited him to a cable TV
operators' conference and trade show, the CCOS-78. It was there
that Birkill met with other satellite TV enthusiasts, who were
interested, and ready to help develop, Birkill