Sky Television plc Sky Television plc Sky Television plc was a public limited company which operated a nine-channel satellite television service, launched by Rupert Murdoch's News International on 5 February 1989. Sky Television and its rival British Satellite Broadcasting suffered large financial losses and merged on 2 November 1990 to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). Programming merger took effect on 1 December 1990. Sky Television plc was originally Satellite Television Ltd. (SATV), a consortium set up by Brian Haynes in November 1980. Haynes was a former journalist employed at Thames Television. In 1979 he produced a documentary for the "TV Eye" strand which
Satellite television by region the offer. The first Soviet communication satellite, called Molniya (Молния, or "Lightning"), was launched in 1965. By November 1967, the national system of satellite television, called Orbita, was deployed. The system consisted of three highly elliptical Molniya satellites, Moscow-based ground uplink facilities and about 20 downlink stations, located in cities and towns of remote regions of Siberia and the Far East. Each station had a 12-meter receiving parabolic antenna and transmitters for re-broadcasting TV signal to local householders. However, a large part of Soviet central regions were still not covered by transponders of Molniya satellites. By 1976, Soviet engineers developed