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Old 13-11-2016, 00:21   #9
RichardCoulter
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Re: Were cable customers able to subscribe to the encrypted BBC services in the 1980'

Quote:
Originally Posted by nodrogd View Post
This service utilised BBC1 & BBC2 during hours of shutdown overnight. Cable companies would have carried this in the same way as analogue terrestrial TV. All cable systems had "off-air" analogue reception equipment & channels 1 to 4 plus any additional regions were carried on an analogue bypass direct to the TV without going through the cable converter. So the necessary decoder could simply be inserted into the coax feed to the TV the way it would with a normal aerial.
Cheers, I presume that (apart from the fact that they had different encryption systems) this meant that the cable companies couldn't have sold the service to their customers on behalf of the BBC to negate the need for a separate STB.

I've only ever had digital cable, so have no experience of analogue.

Did the cable companies take an off air feed from the local transmitters and feed the signals to their customers via a separate feed to their encrypted channels?

Is this how the bypass system worked?
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