[Technologist]

It wasn't theirs as such, it was an IBA/EBU standard that barely anyone else used and didn't catch on.

By the time it merged with Sky it was only 5 years before the first DVB-S broadcast, and 8 years away from the launch of digital broadcasting in the UK. MAC was already becoming obsolete and the IBA was abolished so they were left with it.

If they'd survived they'd almost certainly have ditched MAC and gone with the standard DVB transmission. If it was possible they could have got more channels onto their satellites of course but still no where near as many as Astra. Even if they could stay on Marcopolo, transitioning to digital with so few transponders would have been difficult.

With the cost of owning and running satellites being expensive they'd have ended up on the same satellite as Sky and everyone else. The DVB standard offers everything MAC could and a lot more

The early 1990s were an interesting time as the technology of analogue could be stretched a bit ....
but the Digital answer was not quite there yet!
So we had assorted MACs from the 1980s - about the only one that had any traction was D2MAC as it fiited on cable .... But that did not stop the Europeans for mandating it .....!
We had PAL plus - as demoed on Ch4 - but the super black was a bit of a pain!
And then on the Production side - Snell /BBC R&D Enhanced PAL ...which was almost immdeitely superdcded by SDI SMPTE ST 259M (270 Mbit/s REC601 ) which was just moving out from the labs and was cheaper!
NHK tried to stretch Analogue into HD -(Hi vision) but they were the only ones that got it to work end to end...
(Well there was HD MAC and Eureka 1250 was very good at Production techniques)
and so Leonardo Chiariglione was so frustrated he stopped doing HD and Invented MPEG Video coding...
and NICAM was re -engineered to work at 728 Kbit/secs for Stereo TV sound ...
The ELG was formed - we know it by its 1993 name of DVB - with -S in 1994 and _T in 1997
by which time it was very obvious that the TV world was moving fast to being Digital using standards in Production and emission.. ....
But the early 1990s were full of pseudo analogue things not quite working!!