AlphaStar (satellite broadcasting service)

AlphaStar Digital Television was a direct-to-home satellite broadcasting service for the United States market developed by Canadian firm Tee-Comm Electronics. It was the first direct-to-home satellite broadcasting service in the United States to use the internationally accepted DVB-S broadcasting standard and used 39" satellite dish receivers.^[1] Its service launched in July 1996, but was discontinued completely by September 1997 with 40,000 subscribers as the company went through bankruptcy proceedings.^[2] The American assets of AlphaStar was used under the auspices of the Champion Telecom Platform which used to own the AlphaStar brand.^[3] AlphaStar would also have alleviated a shortage of Canadian satellite capacity by using foreign (US) satellite capacity to fill Canadian needs—indeed this was a requirement for the Canadian company to obtain its license from Canada to commence broadcasting. Tee-Comm, the parent company of AlphaStar had originally co-founded the partnership that created ExpressVu (later Bell Satellite TV) as technology supplier but later divested all interest in ExpressVu.