Chris

BSB didn’t go out of business (not officially anyway). BSB and Sky were both loss-making at the time of their merger, though it’s likely Sky would probably have pulled through without BSB in the end. BSB failed because the satellite tech it opted for required a ton of broadcast power and had room for fewer channels. With the whole premise of subscription TV being quantity of channels, it was always going to look like the poor relation to Sky. The other fatal flaw was in the way spectrum was allocated to national satellite broadcasters in Europe. BSB was the ‘official’ UK broadcaster and occupied the frequencies allocated to the UK. But Rupert Murdoch simply acquired spectrum allocated to Luxembourg and launched a system that was cheaper to buy. He created a competitive market for satellite TV that was never meant to exist and BSB wasn’t designed to resist.