1995 June
1996 June 8-13
News Datacom demonstrates DVB-S technology at the International Television Symposium and Exhibition in Montreux, Switzerland. In conjunction with Irdeto, Pace, NTL, and Tandberg, the technology was shown to visitors who would see a 4 channel multiplex being broadcast via the newly-launched Astra 1D’s Transponder 77.
In their Summer 1995 edition of the EBU Technical Review, the European Broadcasting Union reported that the transmission was received on a 1.2 metre dish with a BSS band LNB and that it had the following parameters:
Downlink Frequency: 11.9535 GHz
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_264-montreux.pdf
Downlink Polarization: Horizontal
Symbol Rate: 20 Msymbols/s
Information Rate: 26.67 Mbit/s
Forward Error Correction (FEC) Rate: 2/3
The video specifications included MPEG2 video of varying qualities, up to 704×576 and 6Mbps. The group of technologies employed were named “VCS4000”, a collaborative effort between NTL providing video compression and metadata, News Datacom providing the encryption, and modulation hardware from Comstream.