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- Digital Canadian
Satellite History -
The Canadian Digital Satellite industry, also known as
Canadian Direct to Home has a
long and interesting history to it. The Hughes Directv/USSB system was
the first successful small dish digital satellite company in the
United States, launching a limited service in 1994.
In the same year, several Canadian satellite companies as well as federal regulators
(CRTC) recognized the need for a Canadian Direct to
Home digital satellite service. It issued a call for
companies interested in initiating a Canadian digital satellite
undertaking to file an application for a CRTC license.
Two companies initially made the first applications, the first
was Expressvu, which was wholly owned by BCE,
Canada's largest Telecommunications holding company. They
initially intended to make use of Canada's only available
commercial satellites to broadcast a mixture of Canadian and
American digital satellite channels to subscribers across Canada.
The second company, was to be known as PowerDirectv, a
partnership between Canada's Power Corp., which had radio and
television holdings and the U.S. Directv satellite
broadcaster.
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An Early Expressvu Canadian digital satellite system with 24" dish and linear LNBF. Early customers were converted to a new LNBF and dishes repointed upon the successful launch of the Nimiq DBS satellite. This also allowed dish sizes to shrink to 18".
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Both companies were successfully licensed in
December of 1994. However shortly after, a large controversy
erupted over the CRTC's steep requirement of 50% Canadian
content. The Canadian content rules states that there must be
equal Canadian channels for every non-Canadian channel carried by
the licensed Canadian satellite company. Additionally,
Canadian satellite broadcasters were forced to
use Canadian satellites for transmission of their signals.
Further adding to the problem was that only CRTC approved
non-Canadian channels could be made available to Canadian
customers. Unfortunately, for PowerDirectv, an overwhelming
percentage of the U.S. channels broadcast from Directv were not
approved for broadcast in Canada. PowerDirectv's arguement to the
CRTC was there at the time, there were not enough Canadian
channels in existance to match the amount of U.S. channels that
they proposed to broadcast. PowerDirectv was able to amend the
Canadian satellite requirement to allow them to broadcast the
U.S. portions of their signal to Canadians via the U.S. Directv
satellite and the Canadian portions via the Canadian Anik E1 or
E2 satellites.
Unfortunately for Canadians patiently waiting for a
alternative to cable vision, these problems caused substantial
delays in bringing a successful digital satellite product to the
Canadian satellite market. It would not be the last however, as
in March of 1996, a near total system failure on Telesat's Anik
E1 satellite caused a near total loss of all satellite capacity.
This meant that Canada no longer has the satellite capacity to
support 2 digital satellite companies. For PowerDirectv, this was
the last straw and shortly after they announced that they were
abandoning plans to launch a satellite service in Canada. This
meant that Expressvu now had the only license, however they had
still not been successful in launching a service, nearly 2 years
after they had been licensed, despite a number of promised and
missed milestones.
Early 1997, nearly 3 years after Expressvu had received their
license from the CRTC, they had still not brought their service
to the market. In the meantime, many Canadians had grown weary of
broken promised and had purchased U.S. "Grey Market" satellite
systems from Directv. Expressvu had little tolerance for these US
systems and declared them illegal and campaigned heavily for
Canadians to wait until they were able to bring their service to
the market. Early 1997 also brought in 2 new CRTC licensees, both
of which were considered risky. Star Choice Television Network, a
small company from New Brunswick and Alphastar Canada, owned by
troubled Canadian satellite equipment manufacturer Tee-Comm
Electronics Inc. A third company, Homestar which was owned by
Canadian Cable vision company Shaw Communications also applied
for a license, however it was rejected.
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Alphastar Canada system with 36" dish. Alphastar was the last Canadian DBS company licensed, yet the first to market only to fail little more than a year later due to financial and organizational problems.
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Ironically, Alphastar was the last company to be licensed, but
the first to bring a successful product to market in the spring
of 1997. Due to the limited satellite capacity of
Canadian satellites Anik E1 and E2, Alphastar
was able to get an exception which allowed them to use a U.S.
medium powered satellite (Telstar 402R) to broadcast their
service. Unfortunately, this meant that their minimum dish size
would be a clumsy 36". Alphastar has also launched a US based
satellite service to the United States using the same Telstar
402R satellite. This meant that they could save on overhead by
eliminating duplicate carriage on many US channels.
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Star Choice Television Network was the second entrant onto the Canadian DBS market. Star Choice later merged with Shaw Communications, giving it the much needed financial support to compete in a changing Canadian marketplace.
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The summer of
1997 brought a successful Star Choice launch to the Canadian
marketplace. Star choice initially planned to utilize U.S.
Echostar equipment for the satellite service, however earlier in
the year, they merged with Shaw Communications, who was unable to
successfully obtain their own DTH satellite license from the CRTC
and also recognizing that the fledgling Star Choice venture
lacked sufficient capital to properly compete with BCE's
Expressvu Inc. After the merger, Star Choice abandoned the
Echostar equipment platform in favor of the cable vision favored
General Instrument platform, which was being used by the U.S.
Primestar service. Due to lack of satellite capacity, Star Choice
was forced to share the limited satellite capacity with
Expressvu, aboard the Anik E2 satellite.
The fall of 1997, finally brought the successful launch of
Expressvu, who had now taken advantage of the abandoned Star
Choice Echostar equipment deal and had adopted the Echostar
platform for their service. Expressvu was licensed by Echostar
for use of their name and trademarks in Canada and began to
market their satellite service as "Expressvu - Dish Network
Canada". Unfortunately for many Canadians who had jumped on the
opportunity to own an Alphastar Canada System, Alphastar
announced troubles in late 1997, which eventually led to a
shutdown of the Alphastar Canada and Alphastar U.S. services.
Alphastar as it turned out was underfunded and was unable to
successfully sway investors to their company. Fortunately many
Alphastar customers were able to salvage some of their
investments by taking advantage of a free Star Choice or
Expressvu trade-in offer.
Expressvu eventually added "Bell" before their name, to take advantage of Bell Canada's good will and recognition in Canada. Today, Star
Choice and Bell
Expressvu remain Canada's only digital satellite companies in
Canada.
More information on both services is
available below. As well, we also have some dedicated
Canadian Satellite Digital Forums for those wishing to discuss these topics.
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09/19/2007 12:08 AM
Welcome to our new site. digitalinsurrection.com is now lounge0101.com. Please excuse our mess as we complete a long overdue redesign of our website. The new primary url of our website is now www.lounge0101.com. Please update your bookmarks. With the redesign, you will find all areas of the website have been updated. Stay tuned for more coming soon.
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