Granada plc another since 1935. It was awarded the North of England ITV franchise in 1954, broadcasting as Granada Television. The company also established a chain of television rental shops from 1959 onwards. Granada entered the publishing business in the 1960s: it combined its operations into the publisher Hart-Davis, MacGibbon in 1972. William Collins, Sons acquired Granada Publishing in 1983. During the 1980s, Granada became involved in the British Satellite Broadcasting satellite television company. This went on air in March 1990, but merged with Sky Television plc in November 1990, to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), in which Granada had a minority
Satellite television satellite signals with his home-built system in 1976. In the US, PBS, a non-profit public broadcasting service, began to distribute its television programming by satellite in 1978. In 1979, Soviet engineers developed the Moskva (or Moscow) system of broadcasting and delivering of TV signals via satellites. They launched the Gorizont communication satellites later that same year. These satellites used geostationary orbits. They were equipped with powerful on-board transponders, so the size of receiving parabolic antennas of downlink stations was reduced to 4 and 2.5 metres. On October 18, 1979, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began allowing people to have home