Airdates
Information is available for the following countries:
In the episode listings, we give airdates against each of the programme
titles. These are actually the date of the first satellite uplink of the
named episode; typically the episode will have been shown by a local station
during the following week, usually the Saturday.
It has been conventional for the episode to receive a repeat within the
first year of airing in order to pad out the season of 26 new episodes
in such a way that the programme can occupy the same slot for the whole
year.
With Deep Space Nine, the second year has seen the repeats being a mixture
of episodes from both the first and second seasons. This will no doubt
cease when the series has enough episodes to be a candiate for striping,
ie nightly repeats in the same slot.
After quite a few years of dithering, the BBC finally signed up to show
Deep Space Nine and it can be seen at 6pm on Thursday evenings on BBC.
However for more recent episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
you have to turn to the satellite broadcaster, BSkyB and their Sky One
channel.
Sky One normally shows new Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes at 3pm
and again at 9pm on Sunday nights; these alternate with Star Trek:
Voyager. Typically, Sky One will show half a season of DS9, then half
a season of Voyager, then back to DS9.
Direct Broadcasting by Satellite is well developed within Europe and
in the UK in particular. The dishes for the Astra satellite where Sky One
broadcasts from can be as small as 45cm (18 inches) and
complete systems including tuner, dish and decoder cost UK#99 (approx US$150).
The pictures from Astra are scrambled and are decoded by a decoder with
an authorising smartcard inserted into it. The cost of a smartcard to
unscramble the Sky multi-channels package is UK#10.99 per month (US$17 approx).
Sky multi-channels includes Sky One, Sky Soaps, Sky Travel,
Nickelodeon, Bravo, CMT, Discovery, TLC, The SciFi Channel, The History
Channel, MTV,
VH-1, QVC, the Children's Channel, The Family Channel, UK Gold and UK Living.
The Astra satelite also carries TNT/Cartoon Network, Sky News, CNN and
Eurosport and a number of German and Dutch stations.
Latest information I have received said Channel 9
was airing Deep Space Nine at 9:30pm on Monday nights.
I am not aware of terrestrial broadcasts, but the Satellite channel
Sat 1 broadcasts DS9. Sat 1 is to be found in the clear on the Astra
satellite. DS9 is dubbed into German.
DS9 has recently started showing in New Zealand.
Episodes will be shown on TV3, a free, but privately-owned channel.
The pilot episode aired on Tuesday 24th Jan 1995 and the second episode
aired on Friday 27 January at 7:30pm. It will continue each Friday at that
time. It takes over the slot held for the last two years by "The Next
Generation" which has moved to Tuesday nights at 7:30pm
(currently, they are almost at the end of season six).
New Zealand information courtesy of
Brian Milne, brianm@moc.govt.nz...
B.King@ee.surrey.ac.uk & D.White@ee.surrey.ac.uk
21st May 1997