United States Satellite Broadcasting

United States Satellite Broadcasting was a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based satellite television company that ran from 1981 to 1999. It was absorbed into DirecTV in 1999.

History

USSB was founded in 1981 by

Thomson Consumer Electronics and Hughes Electronics to come up with a practical digital satellite service capable of 175 channels. The original name of the service was HUBTV,^[2]

named after Hubbard, but was soon changed to USSB. Other key early executives were his sons Stanley E. Hubbard, II and Robert Hubbard, as well as Paul Heinersheid, and Bernard Weiss.

When the service launched, USSB offered a comparatively small slate of channels, but included almost all of the major American

fXM and Showtime Extreme to its lineup.^[3]

Ultimately, the service was too small to succeed, with DirecTV outpacing it in channel capacity and marketing; an additional snag came when the DSS trademark was relinquished by DirecTV in a legal dispute. The Hubbards sold USSB to Hughes in December 1998, with only some employees transferring to DirecTV's El Segundo, CA headquarters and Castle Rock, CO uplink center from USSB's headquarters and uplink facility in St. Paul, MN; the channel lineup of USSB was integrated into DirecTV's lineup by mid-1999.[4]^[5]