PrimeStar was an American

direct broadcast satellite Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location.ITU Radio Regulations, Section IV. Radio Stations and Systems ...

broadcasting company formed in November 1990 by seven cable television companies including

Comcast Comcast Corporation, formerly known as Comcast Holdings,Before the AT&T Broadband, AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, not th ...

Corp. and TCI Communications Corp. PrimeStar was the first medium-powered DBS system in the United States but slowly declined in popularity with the arrival of

DirecTV DirecTV, LLC is an American Multichannel television in the United States, multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital Satellite television, s ...

in 1994 and Dish Network in 1996.

Technology

PrimeStar was a medium-powered DBS-style system utilizing FSS technology that used a larger 3-foot (91 cm) satellite dish to receive signals. Broadcast originally in analog, they later converted to digital technology. The system used the DigiCipher 1 system for conditional access control and

video compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

. The video format was MPEG-2. Primestar's satellite receivers were made by General Instrument. PrimeStar was owned by a consortium of

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

companies who leased equipment to subscribers through the local cable company. The company was in the process of converting to a high-powered DBS platform when it was purchased and shut down by DirecTV. The Tempo-1 and Tempo-2 DBS satellites acquired by PrimeStar from the defunct ASkyB were renamed DirecTV-5 and DirecTV-6, respectively.

History

The system initially launched using medium-powered FSS satellites that were facing obsolescence with the onset of high-powered DBS and its much smaller, eighteen-inch satellite dishes. In a move to convert the platform to DBS, PrimeStar, originally based in

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania Bala Cynwyd ( ) is a community and census-designated place in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located on the Philadelphia Main Line in Southeastern Pennsylvania and borders the western edge of Philadelphia at U.S. Route ...

before moving to the suburbs of Denver, Colorado in 1997, bid for the 110-degree satellite location that was eventually awarded to a never-launched direct broadcast satellite service by MCI and

News Corporation The original incarnation of News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp. and also variously known as News Corporation Limited) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational mass media corporation founded and controlled by media mogul Ru ...

called ASkyB, or '' American Sky Broadcasting'', named after News Corp's British Sky Broadcasting, also named as a combination of the merged companies ''British'' Satellite ''Broadcasting'' and ''Sky'' Television. The ASkyB company sold the incomplete Tempo 1 and Tempo 2 DBS satellites to PrimeStar in the process of going out of business. PrimeStar launched Tempo-2 in 1997 but it was not used for many years. PrimeStar stored the other satellite, Tempo-1, until the company and the two satellites were purchased by

. DirecTV eventually launched the Tempo 1 satellite after years of delays as the DirecTV-5 satellite in 2002. Meanwhile, ASkyB's license for the 110-degree satellite location, and an uplink center, was resold to EchoStar, the parent company of Dish Network. The 110-degree satellite is now named EchoStar West 110 and is the most commonly used satellite, along with 119 as both can be received with a single wide-format parabolic dish, providing signal to North America. PrimeStar Partners sold its assets to

in 1999 and after briefly being known as ''PrimeStar by DirecTV'' all subscribers were converted to the DirecTV platform in 2000. The PrimeStar brand and its FSS broadcast platform was shut down. Meanwhile, Tempo 1 and Tempo 2 satellite remained and were renamed DirecTV-5 and DirecTV-6, respectively, and moved to several locations to serve DirecTV customers.

Features

During Primestar's years as a competing satellite television provider, it originally had a 95-channel lineup. However, beginning on April 20, 1997, Primestar announced it would add 65 channels, for a total of 160 channels. However, due to a lack of capacity on the FSS platform, many channels only aired for part of the day or week (e.g., MuchMusic USA aired weekdays from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET, and weekends from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. ET). Primestar, also at this time in 1997, grouped their channels by category, (e.g., "NEWS", "FAMILY", "SPORTS", "MOVIES", etc.), and added a color-coded button on the remote for each category. When pressed, it would bring the user to the beginning of that category, (e.g., pressing the orange "FAMILY" button would bring the user to

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first ca ...

which was first in that category). Primestar called this feature "Hyper-Surfing". (Earlier remotes that lacked the buttons could instead use repetitive channel numbers to bring them to the desired category.)

New uses for old equipment

Old PrimeStar satellite dishes are popular among hobbyists for

free-to-air Free-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscri ...

(FTA) satellite broadcasts on the K_u band transponders of FSS satellites. The dishes are also popular for wireless computer networking as high-gain

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

antennas. The antennas are also used by amateur (ham) radio operators to transmit two-way

amateur television Amateur television (ATV) is the transmission of broadcast quality video and sound reproduction, audio over the wide range of frequencies of radio waves allocated for radio amateur (ham) use. ATV is used for non-commercial experimentation, pleasure ...

References

External links