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- Digital Canadian Satellite History -


The Canadian Digital Satellite industry, also known as Canadian Direct to Home has a long and interesting history to it. The Hughes Directv/USSB system was the first successful small dish digital satellite company in the United States, launching a limited service in 1994.

In the same year, several Canadian satellite companies as well as federal regulators (CRTC) recognized the need for a Canadian Direct to Home digital satellite service. It issued a call for companies interested in initiating a Canadian digital satellite undertaking to file an application for a CRTC license.

Two companies initially made the first applications, the first was Expressvu, which was wholly owned by BCE, Canada's largest Telecommunications holding company. They initially intended to make use of Canada's only available commercial satellites to broadcast a mixture of Canadian and American digital satellite channels to subscribers across Canada. The second company, was to be known as PowerDirectv, a partnership between Canada's Power Corp., which had radio and television holdings and the U.S. Directv satellite broadcaster.

Early Expressvu System An Early Expressvu Canadian digital satellite system with 24" dish and linear LNBF. Early customers were converted to a new LNBF and dishes repointed upon the successful launch of the Nimiq DBS satellite. This also allowed dish sizes to shrink to 18".

Both companies were successfully licensed in December of 1994. However shortly after, a large controversy erupted over the CRTC's steep requirement of 50% Canadian content. The Canadian content rules states that there must be equal Canadian channels for every non-Canadian channel carried by the licensed Canadian satellite company. Additionally, Canadian satellite broadcasters were forced to use Canadian satellites for transmission of their signals.

Further adding to the problem was that only CRTC approved non-Canadian channels could be made available to Canadian customers. Unfortunately, for PowerDirectv, an overwhelming percentage of the U.S. channels broadcast from Directv were not approved for broadcast in Canada. PowerDirectv's arguement to the CRTC was there at the time, there were not enough Canadian channels in existance to match the amount of U.S. channels that they proposed to broadcast. PowerDirectv was able to amend the Canadian satellite requirement to allow them to broadcast the U.S. portions of their signal to Canadians via the U.S. Directv satellite and the Canadian portions via the Canadian Anik E1 or E2 satellites.

Unfortunately for Canadians patiently waiting for a alternative to cable vision, these problems caused substantial delays in bringing a successful digital satellite product to the Canadian satellite market. It would not be the last however, as in March of 1996, a near total system failure on Telesat's Anik E1 satellite caused a near total loss of all satellite capacity. This meant that Canada no longer has the satellite capacity to support 2 digital satellite companies. For PowerDirectv, this was the last straw and shortly after they announced that they were abandoning plans to launch a satellite service in Canada. This meant that Expressvu now had the only license, however they had still not been successful in launching a service, nearly 2 years after they had been licensed, despite a number of promised and missed milestones.

Early 1997, nearly 3 years after Expressvu had received their license from the CRTC, they had still not brought their service to the market. In the meantime, many Canadians had grown weary of broken promised and had purchased U.S. "Grey Market" satellite systems from Directv. Expressvu had little tolerance for these US systems and declared them illegal and campaigned heavily for Canadians to wait until they were able to bring their service to the market. Early 1997 also brought in 2 new CRTC licensees, both of which were considered risky. Star Choice Television Network, a small company from New Brunswick and Alphastar Canada, owned by troubled Canadian satellite equipment manufacturer Tee-Comm Electronics Inc. A third company, Homestar which was owned by Canadian Cable vision company Shaw Communications also applied for a license, however it was rejected.

Alpha Star Canada System Alphastar Canada system with 36" dish. Alphastar was the last Canadian DBS company licensed, yet the first to market only to fail little more than a year later due to financial and organizational problems.

Ironically, Alphastar was the last company to be licensed, but the first to bring a successful product to market in the spring of 1997. Due to the limited satellite capacity of Canadian satellites Anik E1 and E2, Alphastar was able to get an exception which allowed them to use a U.S. medium powered satellite (Telstar 402R) to broadcast their service. Unfortunately, this meant that their minimum dish size would be a clumsy 36". Alphastar has also launched a US based satellite service to the United States using the same Telstar 402R satellite. This meant that they could save on overhead by eliminating duplicate carriage on many US channels.
Star Choice Satellite System Star Choice Television Network was the second entrant onto the Canadian DBS market. Star Choice later merged with Shaw Communications, giving it the much needed financial support to compete in a changing Canadian marketplace.
The summer of 1997 brought a successful Star Choice launch to the Canadian marketplace. Star choice initially planned to utilize U.S. Echostar equipment for the satellite service, however earlier in the year, they merged with Shaw Communications, who was unable to successfully obtain their own DTH satellite license from the CRTC and also recognizing that the fledgling Star Choice venture lacked sufficient capital to properly compete with BCE's Expressvu Inc. After the merger, Star Choice abandoned the Echostar equipment platform in favor of the cable vision favored General Instrument platform, which was being used by the U.S. Primestar service. Due to lack of satellite capacity, Star Choice was forced to share the limited satellite capacity with Expressvu, aboard the Anik E2 satellite.

The fall of 1997, finally brought the successful launch of Expressvu, who had now taken advantage of the abandoned Star Choice Echostar equipment deal and had adopted the Echostar platform for their service. Expressvu was licensed by Echostar for use of their name and trademarks in Canada and began to market their satellite service as "Expressvu - Dish Network Canada". Unfortunately for many Canadians who had jumped on the opportunity to own an Alphastar Canada System, Alphastar announced troubles in late 1997, which eventually led to a shutdown of the Alphastar Canada and Alphastar U.S. services. Alphastar as it turned out was underfunded and was unable to successfully sway investors to their company. Fortunately many Alphastar customers were able to salvage some of their investments by taking advantage of a free Star Choice or Expressvu trade-in offer.

Expressvu eventually added "Bell" before their name, to take advantage of Bell Canada's good will and recognition in Canada. Today, Star Choice and Bell Expressvu remain Canada's only digital satellite companies in Canada.

More information on both services is available below. As well, we also have some dedicated Canadian Satellite Digital Forums for those wishing to discuss these topics.




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