Squarial

~ the goodbye ~

The Squarial worked in one country, on one satellite pair, for one broadcaster that lasted eight months on air. In 1990 I was a small child in Turkey, where television meant TRT and a new private channel being beamed in from Germany, so a flat aerial for a British pay-TV service was never going to arrive on my street. This is a British object end to end, and the reason it is here is that it is one of the few consumer products whose entire life fits inside a single year.

The word is a squeeze of "square" and "aerial". BSB had won the UK's direct broadcast satellite franchise in december 1986 and needed something to distinguish itself from Rupert Murdoch's Sky, which was using the Astra satellite and ordinary round dishes. The answer was a phased array: a flat panel holding 144 or 256 tiny resonant cavities embedded in plastic, all of them receiving the same signal and adding it up electronically instead of bouncing it off a curved reflector. Sky's dishes were 60 cm and had to hang off the side of the house. The Squarial was under 45 cm and could sit flat against a wall.

It went on sale in march 1990 with the BSB launch, under the slogan "It's Smart to be Square". Squarials went up on hundreds of thousands of British homes. On 2 november 1990 BSB and Sky announced a 50:50 merger, and within days the Squarial was withdrawn from sale. The merged company kept Sky's PAL signal on Astra and dropped the D-MAC standard the Squarial existed to receive.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dummy ~

The Squarial was announced at Marco Polo House, BSB's headquarters in Battersea, at a press event meant to show off how much better MAC pictures looked than PAL. The picture quality took second place immediately. Journalists saw the flat panel and wrote about the flat panel, and nobody in the room asked whether one had ever been built. None had. What sat on the table was a mock-up in wood and plastic, and the manufacturing deal with a British company called Fortel had been signed hours earlier.

BSB then built its marketing on a thing that did not exist yet, on the assumption that somebody would eventually make it work as well as a much larger dish. STC in Paignton got there first, at 38 cm rather than the promised size and costing more than a conventional dish. Supply was short at launch, so BSB quietly bought Squarials from Matsushita in Japan, which was already making them in volume for the Japanese market, and subsidized them heavily into the hands of the four licensed receiver manufacturers. All four of those manufacturers also offered a plain 30 cm mini dish, slightly cheaper, that did exactly the same job.

~ the postmortem ~

BSB and Sky were both losing enormous sums, somewhere around 1.5 billion dollars between them, and neither could survive alone. The merger on 2 november 1990 was presented as an equal one and was in practice a decision about which technical stack to keep. Sky's PAL on Astra was cheaper for viewers and already in more homes, so D-MAC and the Marcopolo satellites went. BSB's five channels were rationalized away over the following months.

The hardware kept working for a while, because BSkyB carried the Sky channels over D-MAC on Marcopolo for a period after the merger. Then the satellites were sold. Marcopolo 2 went to Telenor of Norway on 1 july 1992 and Marcopolo 1 went to NSAB of Sweden on 21 december 1993. Sources differ on whether the last British transmission was in 1992 or 1993. Either way, everyone who had bought a Squarial ended up with a plastic square on the wall pointed at a satellite that had emigrated.

~ what got buried with it ~

The Squarial is remembered in Britain as a joke about vaporware, which undersells it. The phased array was real engineering and the physics was sound; the panel only worked because the Marcopolo satellites transmitted at high power, which was the part BSB actually paid for. What killed it was not the antenna at all. It was a regulator insisting on an unproven European transmission standard against a competitor who ignored the standard and launched thirteen months earlier. Behind that sat buyers who had watched VHS beat Betamax and decided to sit this one out too.

Anyone in the UK who bought a satellite receiver in 1990 was picking a side in a format war with no way to know which side would exist in a year. Most people picked correctly by not picking. The ones who liked the square better than the dish paid for that preference with a dead box.

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