It was launched in October 1995 to the Astra 19.2°E orbital slot initially to provide digital television and radio for direct-to-home (DTH) across Europe.

Astra 1E was the first Astra satellite to be dedicated to digital television broadcasting and it carried many of the first digital television channels from networks broadcasting to France, Germany, and other European countries in the 1990s.

The FSS beams provide footprints that cover essentially the same area of Europe – northern, central and eastern Europe, including Spain and northern Italy – while the BSS horizontal beam excludes Spain and extends further east, and the BSS vertical beam includes Spain and more of southern Italy but does not extend so far east.

[2] Within the footprints, television signals are usually received with a 60–80 cm dish.

In October 2007, following the successful deployment of Astra 1L at 19.2° East, Astra 1E was moved to Astra's new DTH orbital position, 23.5° East[3] where it provided capacity for the transmission of new services including the ASTRA2Connect two-way satellite broadband Internet service which provides high speed internet access and Voice over IP (VoIP) without landline connection at up to 2 Mbit/s download speeds and 128 kbit/s upload [4] using four Ku-band transponders for both forward and return paths from the user's remote terminal.