Satellite television C. Clarke proposed a worldwide communications system which would function by means of three satellites equally spaced apart in earth orbit. 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 public satellite television signals from Europe to North America were relayed via the Telstar satellite over the Atlantic ocean on 23 July 1962, although a test broadcast had taken place almost two weeks earlier on 11 July. The signals were received and broadcast in North American and European countries and watched by over
Satellite television (SBCA) was founded on December 2, 1986 as the result of a merger between SPACE and the Direct Broadcast Satellite Association (DBSA). Videocipher II used analog scrambling on its video signal and Data Encryption Standard–based encryption on its audio signal. VideoCipher II was defeated, and there was a black market for descrambler devices which were initially sold as "test" devices. The necessity for better satellite television programming than TVRO arose in the 1980s. Satellite television services, first in Europe, began transmitting K band signals in the late 1980s. On 11 December 1988 Luxembourg launched Astra 1A, the first satellite to