History of television This was published in the October 1945 issue of the Wireless World magazine and won him the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1963. The first satellite television signals from Europe to North America were relayed via the Telstar satellite over the Atlantic ocean on July 23, 1962. The signals were received and broadcast in North American and European countries and watched by over 100 million. Launched in 1962, the "Relay 1" satellite was the first satellite to transmit television signals from the US to Japan. The first geosynchronous communication satellite, Syncom 2, was launched on July 26, 1963. The
British Satellite Broadcasting the Astra operator, had no regulatory permission to broadcast, had plans (initially) for only one satellite with no backup, and the European satellite launch vehicle "Ariane" suffered repeated failures. However, SES used the resulting delay time to re-engineer the satellite to reduce the dish size needed, which would otherwise have been larger than 60 cm (24"). To distance itself from Sky and its dish antennas, BSB announced a new type of flat-plate satellite antenna called a "squarial" (i.e., "square aerial"). The illustrative model shown to the press was a dummy and BSB commissioned a working version which was under 45