24-06-2017, 11:06 AM
Belgium discontinued 819-line broadcasts in 1968 and, by the time I first visited Belgium in 1973, the French were in the process of closing down their 819-line system so I doubt there was any real continuing demand for the additional cost of providing 819-line reception just for one channel - the 2nd and 3rd French programmes were on 625-lines, anyway.
Nevertheless, it was interesting to see the sets on display in shop windows. Often two, visually identical sets would be shown side by side but at very different prices! The expensive one was obviously the multi-standard version.
Shortly after, cable TV reached the coast - it had started in the difficult reception areas of the Ardennes in the east and worked its way west across the country. The take-up was virtually instantaneous! One year every building on the coast (or so it seemed at the time) was bristling with massive aerial masts, often guyed to all four corners of the building. Band I,III, IV & V arrays pointed in virtually every direction - there was no point is directing a VHF array towards Dover, for example - and some featured rotators.
A year later and they had virtually all disappeared. As a manager at Tevewest explained to me, it was easy to attract customers to cable as they could save considerably more than the annual subscription in the savings from buying a single standard TV. I would guess that the insurance on all those aerial installations didn't come cheap, either, as they all came down very quickly!
Compared to UK cable, the interesting thing is that Belgian cable didn't really offer its subscribers much more than they already had! Apart from one subscription channel - Filmnet - which required a decoder plugged into the SCART connector, every channel was free-to-air already!
A typical line up on the coast in pre-cable days was (starting from the north and moving clockwise):
NOS1 Dutch
NOS2 Dutch
BRT1 Flemish
BRT2 Flemish
RTBF1 Walloon/French
RTBF2 Walloon/French
TF1 French
A2 French
FR3 French
BBC1
BBC2
ITV (Southern)
To this line-up, cable added the following:
RTL Luxembourg/French
WDR German
ZDF German
RAI Uno Italian
There was also a Mozaic channel containing miniaturised versions of all these channels on a 4 x 4 matrix and the Filmnet channel.
Of note is that RAI was the only channel provided from a satellite feed! (There are large numbers of Italian immigrants in Belgium.)
Obviously, pre-cable the UK channels probably didn't travel far once you moved away from the coast and some of the others might be a bit problematic as you went further from the appropriate border but Flanders, in particular, is very flat!
The initial cable network only extended to 300MHz, so all programs used VHF channel which meant additional 'special' channels were added both above and below Band III and Set Top Converters were provided. However, manufacturers quickly developed multi-band tuner units and the converters were quickly phased out. Later, the Hyperband was added (300 - 470MHz) and tuners finally offered continuous tuning from 47 - 862MHz!
It is, perhaps, ironic that, within a year or two of the collapse of what must have been the world's largest market for multi-standard receivers, the likes of Philips were producing multi-standard PAL/SECAM/NTSC IC decoders for very little more than the cost of the single standard variants!
Nevertheless, it was interesting to see the sets on display in shop windows. Often two, visually identical sets would be shown side by side but at very different prices! The expensive one was obviously the multi-standard version.
Shortly after, cable TV reached the coast - it had started in the difficult reception areas of the Ardennes in the east and worked its way west across the country. The take-up was virtually instantaneous! One year every building on the coast (or so it seemed at the time) was bristling with massive aerial masts, often guyed to all four corners of the building. Band I,III, IV & V arrays pointed in virtually every direction - there was no point is directing a VHF array towards Dover, for example - and some featured rotators.
A year later and they had virtually all disappeared. As a manager at Tevewest explained to me, it was easy to attract customers to cable as they could save considerably more than the annual subscription in the savings from buying a single standard TV. I would guess that the insurance on all those aerial installations didn't come cheap, either, as they all came down very quickly!
Compared to UK cable, the interesting thing is that Belgian cable didn't really offer its subscribers much more than they already had! Apart from one subscription channel - Filmnet - which required a decoder plugged into the SCART connector, every channel was free-to-air already!
A typical line up on the coast in pre-cable days was (starting from the north and moving clockwise):
NOS1 Dutch
NOS2 Dutch
BRT1 Flemish
BRT2 Flemish
RTBF1 Walloon/French
RTBF2 Walloon/French
TF1 French
A2 French
FR3 French
BBC1
BBC2
ITV (Southern)
To this line-up, cable added the following:
RTL Luxembourg/French
WDR German
ZDF German
RAI Uno Italian
There was also a Mozaic channel containing miniaturised versions of all these channels on a 4 x 4 matrix and the Filmnet channel.
Of note is that RAI was the only channel provided from a satellite feed! (There are large numbers of Italian immigrants in Belgium.)
Obviously, pre-cable the UK channels probably didn't travel far once you moved away from the coast and some of the others might be a bit problematic as you went further from the appropriate border but Flanders, in particular, is very flat!
The initial cable network only extended to 300MHz, so all programs used VHF channel which meant additional 'special' channels were added both above and below Band III and Set Top Converters were provided. However, manufacturers quickly developed multi-band tuner units and the converters were quickly phased out. Later, the Hyperband was added (300 - 470MHz) and tuners finally offered continuous tuning from 47 - 862MHz!
It is, perhaps, ironic that, within a year or two of the collapse of what must have been the world's largest market for multi-standard receivers, the likes of Philips were producing multi-standard PAL/SECAM/NTSC IC decoders for very little more than the cost of the single standard variants!
