[James2001]

Some footage from the last day of BSB's Power Station, including Pat Sharp walking round their studios. Wonder where they are, because it doesn't look like Marcopolo House

www.youtube.com 

Mod Note: Dedicated BSB thread split out from the more general 'Social Media Gold' thread as there's a lot of good discussion here.

[WillPS]

Some footage from the last day of BSB's Power Station, including Pat Sharp walking round their studios. Wonder where they are, because it doesn't look like Marcopolo House

www.youtube.com 

Very interesting. I had always presumed it was from Marcopolo House but as you say it certainly doesn't look like it!

Doesn't look like it was an independent/outsourced production either. Very weird.

I've always wondered why The Power Station wasn't immediately booted off - it was the only one of the BSB closure channels to get British Sky Broadcasting rebranding. Either they were considering keeping it and adding to Astra (as they did Movie Channel and eventually Sports) or they simply couldn't work out what to replace it with. If I was a BSB viewer I'd have been rather annoyed to see my 4 channel subscription-free service dropped to only 3 channels free, but then I suppose these were are the breaks for early adoption...

[Blubatt]

Very interesting. I had always presumed it was from Marcopolo House but as you say it certainly doesn't look like it!

Doesn't look like it was an independent/outsourced production either. Very weird.

I've always wondered why The Power Station wasn't immediately booted off - it was the only one of the BSB closure channels to get British Sky Broadcasting rebranding. Either they were considering keeping it and adding to Astra (as they did Movie Channel and eventually Sports) or they simply couldn't work out what to replace it with. If I was a BSB viewer I'd have been rather annoyed to see my 4 channel subscription-free service dropped to only 3 channels free, but then I suppose these were are the breaks for early adoption...

I would imagine that it had more to do with contractual obligation to air the concerts and such that the channel was known for. It only survived another 5 months

[WillPS]

I would imagine that it had more to do with contractual obligation to air the concerts and such that the channel was known for. It only survived another 5 months

Not so sure. They could have just bammed them out on the 'Sky Arts' opt they created to fulfill the Now channel's obligations in that regard.

If that Power Station programming was outsourced (which would explain why it'd be based somewhere else too) then that could indeed have been something they couldn't get out of quickly - but I can't see any indication in the credits of that video that was the case.

[James2001]

I've always wondered why The Power Station wasn't immediately booted off - it was the only one of the BSB closure channels to get British Sky Broadcasting rebranding. Either they were considering keeping it and adding to Astra (as they did Movie Channel and eventually Sports) or they simply couldn't work out what to replace it with. If I was a BSB viewer I'd have been rather annoyed to see my 4 channel subscription-free service dropped to only 3 channels free, but then I suppose these were are the breaks for early adoption...

I remember reading that they were seriouslyusly considering adding it to Astra, but in the end decided it wasn't worth trying to compete with MTV. Don't know how true that is though.

[thegeek]

Some footage from the last day of BSB's Power Station, including Pat Sharp walking round their studios. Wonder where they are, because it doesn't look like Marcopolo House

www.youtube.com 

I love how tiny an operation this must have been - the credit roll at 5:39 mentions Toby Amies as both presenter and researcher, and the floor manager as Ramond T. Strange - who shows up as presenter at the start of of Jonathan Coleman's Swing Shift.

some more music channel goodies: here's some behind the scenes footage from MTV, when they were based across the road from Eggcup House on Hawley Crescent (in what was apparently at the time Chrysalis TV)

vimeo.com 

[James2001]

There's a house on my estate that still has a BSB dish (not a squarial) attatched to the chimney, I guess nobody's felt it's worth going up there to remove it.

BSB were onto a loser right from the start really, restricted to only 5 channels, when Astra already had more when it first launched (and kept being added to).

Also interesting that when The Movie Channel moved onto Astra in 1991, even though it had a revamp, there was no "Sky" branding, it didn't get that until the next revamp in 1993.

[Stooky Bill]

The 5 channel thing is even more odd sounding these days when you realise they had two satellites, each with 5 transponders. One satellite was purely for redundancy. Though that arrangement included the potential to expand the number of channels later on.

The IBA were really engineering their satellite service to terrestrial levels of redundancy even though satellite failures are rare

[James2001]

Apparently they did strike a deal to get Ireland's 5 DBS channels, but even then 10 channels was well behind what Sky/Astra were offering by the early 90s (and what cable had been offering even before BSB was around).

The entire DBS thing was a flop, especially once you had the likes of Astra and Eurobird launching without the heavy restrictions on channels and technical standards. I'm not even sure if any other countries ever launched their "official" DBS services, or if BSB was the only one.

[Neil Jones]

Do we need to remember the project had been tooted since the early 1980s, then was heavily delayed until the mid 1980s because of cost wrangling and didn't get going until the late 80s, and by that point the plan was pretty much sunk, even more so when Sky launched a year or so before them. Sky Television of course having already been on the air in some form via satellite for much of the 1980s to Europe IIRC.