According to the World Radio and TV Handbook GBC Gibraltar broadcasts DVB-T with 2 Muxes.

Talking of BFBS the service for the base at Akrotiri in Cyprus can be watched in homes near the base.A few years ago they broadcast a BBC travel programming singing the praises of holidaying in Turkish north Cyprus.As you can imagine the Nicosia government went into melt-down.......

It wouldn't have, not until the 80s at the earliest and maybe not until the 90s.


As others have said, it would have been tapes and they would probably only have loosely followed the ITV UK schedule. If the flights were regular enough they might have shown the previous nights News at Ten at lunch time.

People were willing to pay good money for UK newspapers on the Costa del Sol even though they were a couple of days out of date so there was clearly at appetite for keeping up with events from back home.

And pre recorded shows like Corrie could be shown in the regular ITV time slot


All totally hypothetical of course.

This is a relatively recent development. In the 1970s and into the '80s, France's overseas territories had no direct links with the mainland. Various overseas stations had tapes and films flown in from Europe and produced their own news.

Alaska and Hawaii also had no live TV links to the rest of the U.S. until the 1980s (with the exception of some special programming -- Super Bowls, the Oscars, etc.)

Considering that Gibraltar has such a small population -- some 30,000 people -- I'm not sure any satellite link just for the territory would have been worth the expense. Even small French territories tend to pick up their programming from continent-wide satellites, so the station in French Guiana, for instance, is served by the same satellite as the station in Martinique, which reduces costs. Also, until the advent of digital, France's territories did not have the full array of French TV stations. They had one or two stations that cherry-picked the "best of" France's mainland services.


A major reason is the legal set-up of those territories. French territories are considered a part of France -- as much as, say, Grenoble --, while Britain's overseas territories are not a part of the UK, but rather self-governing dependencies under British sovereignty. In practice, this means that they run their broadcasting systems. For instance, Bermuda's TV stations are affiliated with American networks and are essentially an extension of the U.S. TV market!

This is what happened in Alaska and Hawaii; the stations there would show tapes of the national evening news late at night or, in some cases, the next day, when the tapes arrived on regularly scheduled flights.

In the USA in the days of analogue, crossed the country in the same way as the Original Eurovision, that is high power TX sending to a receiver a long way away and then re sending on high power and so on and so on! And remember, long before Direct to home satallite, there were commercial birds up there used by broadcasters.. "Elvis in Hawaii" is an example of that being used.

True, but for a long time, satellite links were very expensive and used only for special events.

This begs an interesting question.

I wonder what the first live TV programme from the UK seen in Gibraltar was?

The 1966 world cup was transmitted across Europe of course but it would only have been possible to pick it up off air from Spain.

They carried what was then BBC Europe from the early 1990s apparently so probably a news programme.

Surely there was something before then?

Gib TV went on the air in 1962 and converted to colour in 1980. As has been mentioned in 1962 the technology would not have existed to take satellite feeds and TVE would not give them a terrestrial signal (although it would also have been very expensive to bring programmes by microwave from the UK).

Err, well no, of course not. 1962 was the year of the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, so still quite a way to go technologically at that point

i don't comment much on here but what a pathetic comment

all the best to the OP

By the early '80s Gibs (non-military) connectivity was a super-group or so of voice channels that terminated in Madrid, and thence went nowhere. A microwave link across to the Atlas mountains in Morocco, giving cct's to Morocco and a few cct's to the UK via cable from Morocco and Lisbon to Cornwall and thence Mondail/Farriday or wherever C&W went to.

There was also a single C&W satellite dish aligned on one of the Intelsat positions.

Alas, this wasn't a position that broadcast multi-laterals, so any sporting event that was required by GibTV needed to be specially ordered and a unilateral paid for. Sad sort of affairs really, at the time Spain, France and Portugal were using the emergence of what were then called dom-sats (Eutelsat, Francesat etc) to ensure that their TV and culture was fully distributed to every territory within a practicable footprint. We just piessed about barely getting TV to the Channel Islands, although SABRE was a super bit of engineering.

Yes, you can get Sky in Gib now, although only Sky, not the FreeSal (PSB) channels, and obviously only on one side of the Rock.

Legally or in a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" way (like in Spain, for instance)?

There are plenty of bars and other places in Spain that advertise Sky so it can't be that ''wink,wink''. All you need is a UK address (yours or someone else's).

In the 1990s, a family friend sent a Sky smartcard to us in Slovenia by mail and it was seized by the British postal authorities, who claimed that sending satellite TV smartcards abroad was prohibited.

I've never been to Gibraltar but I wonder if Documentary Fan meant that literally.

i.e. Is the rock so tall and steep it actually blocks out satellite reception for those in its shadow?

I think you mean tedjrr, not me.

If you are paying a Sky subscription they don't care where you are, they know plenty of Brits (and others) watch Sky in Spain and there are even companies who advertise themselves as Sky registered agents.

Sky wouldn't care because of themselves (they get the money anyway, as you rightly point out), but because of their contracts with international distributors, who have sold only the UK (and Ireland) rights to BSkyB. But if the practice is tolerated these days, they must not care that much. That's certainly a change since the 1990s.

EU policy is for total access to programming across borders without political interference. Not sure where that leaves a broadcaster who has paid a large amount of money for exclusive rights to an event in their country.

Sorry, yes tedjrr.

My point was that if houses are literally in the shadow of the rock they might not be able to get a satellite signal.

Don't forget the angle of the signal coming down from the sky will be much less steep in Gibraltar than in the UK.

No, the other way round, nearer to the equator so the satellite's elevation is higher.

In those early days the satellites were not geostationary so you would only get a signal for about 20 minutes in any hour.I doubt the Americans would have allowed Telstar to be used to feed Gibraltar !

Eh ? Who was suggesting that was an option ?