1976: HBO Moves to Satellite, Taylor Howard Builds a Dish
In 1976, premium programmer Home Box Office (HBO) made history by initiating satellite delivery of programming to cable headends with the heavyweight boxing battle dubbed, "The Thriller From Manila." The move by HBO was followed quickly by Ted Turner, who began to uplink his then unknown Atlanta UHF-TV station, now known as WTBS. Tuner branded it "America's Station" and the "Superstation" was born. In 1977 Pat Robertson launched the first satellite-delivered "basic" cable service, CBN Cable Network, the predecessor of The Family Channel. While all this was happening with the cable operator in mind, Stanford University Professor Emeritus H. Taylor Howard was also busy in his garage.
Howard, a lead scientist on several interplanetary NASA probes with key communication systems on the Apollo Program, would soon build America's first consumer DTH system. In a strange-but-true story, he also became the first consumer to actually pay (or attempt to pay) HBO directly for its signal (the check was returned with a letter explaining that HBO only sold its signal to cable operators). As "techies" began to grasp the capabilities of satellite TV, a small group of entrepreneurs moved from hobbyists to business people. These pioneers - many operating out of their garages - gave birth to an "industry" which sold approximately 5,000 systems in 1980. Each of these systems, boasting an antenna 12 feet or more in diameter, fetched a whopping $10,000. The journey to