Thread: SD Were cable customers able to subscribe to the encrypted BBC services in the 1980's?
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Old 13-11-2016, 17:47   #10
nodrogd
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Re: Were cable customers able to subscribe to the encrypted BBC services in the 1980'
Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter View Post
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?
Cable started with every company having a headend comprising a dish farm & a mast with a plethora of analogue TV & FM radio aerials.



The signal was fed in the same way it is now, with a Jerrold cable converter box feeding the TV. This box was a lttle bigger then the current superhub 3, & was basically a channel transposer taking a cable channel from a lower frequency up to a preset UHF TV channel (rather like the output from a VHS recorder). This also included a macrovision decoder to descamble encrypted channels. The main "off-air" BBC ITV Ch4 feeds were transposed onto unused UHF TV channels at the headend in unecrypted form. These went through a metal bypass box attached to the back of the decoder, which passed the standard UHF TV channels directly to the TV without going through the box. The maximum amount of available channels available via the converter was around 60.

Last edited by nodrogd; 13-11-2016 at 17:54.
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