British Satellite Broadcasting British Satellite Broadcasting British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) was a television company, headquartered in London, that provided direct broadcast satellite television services to the United Kingdom. The company was merged with Sky Television plc on 2 November 1990 to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). It started broadcasting on 25 March 1990. In 1977, the World Administrative Radio Conference assigned each country five high-powered channels for direct broadcast by satellite (DBS) for domestic use. In 1982, after being awarded two of the channels, the BBC proposed its own satellite service, with two conditions: During Autumn 1983, the cost of Unisat was found
Independent Broadcasting Authority E&D's engineers also designed and built some of the first digital audio equipment for satellite broadcasting including systems using data packets. E&D's engineers made many important contributions to digital television data-rate reduction whereby the encoding of a standard analogue PAL colour signal requiring some 130 Megabits/second has been reduced to less than 4 Megabits/second as used on current digital television broadcasting. In the late 1980s the IBA was appointed as regulator and transmitter operator for the first DBS (Direct Broadcasting by Satellite) service for the UK and awarded the franchise to BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting). In advance of this, the