The service launched on March 1, 1978, with wider adoption beginning in September 1978 as more satellite downlinks were installed at each PBS stations.
Starting in 1971, PBS began distributing programs via microwave relay circuits leased from AT&T Long Lines.
One problem was that video and audio quality would be lessened the farther away a receiving station was due to the distance the program had to travel via the interconnection system.
[14] By 1987, "less than half of PBS’s member stations" could adequately decode and broadcast DATE audio signals due to these high costs and the lack of available parts.
[20] DACS, considered a form of "electronic mail," allowed PBS and its stations to communicate with each other about private matters.
One of these viewers was named Diane Friedel Davis, who lived in St. Joe, Arkansas, a rural part of the state; she appeared before a congressional hearing on July 31, 1987, to discuss the recently proposed Satellite TV Fair Marketing Act.
[14] Michael E. Hobbs, the former Vice President of Policy and Planning for PBS, urged congress to remove this section.
"We urge you to delete the section that prohibits PBS from scrambling: not because we want to scramble, but because the practical effect of that section would be to freeze public television in the backwater of an obsolescent technology, and deny real benefits to home dish owners and broadcast viewers alike," he said in a statement.
[14] In Diane’s statement, she echoed the sentiment felt by home-dish viewers at the time by expressing her worry about PBS potentially encrypting their signals.
[14] She continued, "There are the farmers, the elderly, the physically challenged, and millions of rural Americans who, for one reason or another, live in remote and isolated areas of this vast country.
Should these people be denied their First Amendment rights just because they do not live in urban or suburban areas where a television signal is received over a standard VHF antenna?
"We are planning to use that technology to install stereo audio capability system-wide, a dream that we have had in public television for 20 years.
We are also working on the development of Descriptive Video Services for the blind, and multi-lingual audio tracks for the non-English-speakers in our audience.
"We at PBS are proud to have worked vigorously since our earliest days to extend public television service to as many Americans as possible.
[24] On March 15, 1988, Bruce L. Christensen, the President of PBS at the time, appeared before a Senate committee to discuss the proposed Public Telecommunications Act of 1988.
[25] This act included a provision stating that PBS must provide a "clear" feed of its programming to home-dish viewers who do not have a decoder.
[24] In this plan, PBS would continue to lease four C-band transponders starting in 1991, with the goal being to convert their satellite operations to Ku-band sometime in 1993 or 1994.
[24] In 1991, PBS purchased C-band transponder space on the Spacenet 1 satellite, owned by GTE, at orbital position 120°W.
[9] PBS said that as many as 80 educational services would be provided via Telstar 401, allowing libraries, schools, and universities to access a multitude of programming on the same satellite.
[28] PBS moved to Telstar 401, at orbital position 97°W, on February 5, 1994, ending primary program distribution to affiliates via C-band.
[27] Sometime in early 1996, PBS made the switch to DigiCipher II and, in the process, converted their services from analog to digital.
[9] In April, an agreement was made with GE Americom for PBS to purchase transponder space on GE-3, a satellite at orbital position 87W that launched on August 9, 1996.
PBS said that the "vast majority" of programming would be sent via NRT distribution, a move away from the tape-based interconnection system currently in use.
[9] According to PBS, "smaller, financially strained, rural market" stations would air a program as it was being fed via satellite; this was done to save costs.
[35] Two-thirds of interviewed stations, eight out the chosen twelve, expressed dissatisfaction with the current version of the interconnection system.
As part of this plan, PBS would switch their primary feeds back to the C-band spectrum beginning in March 2016; however, this transition never occurred.
[35] With initial tests proving successful, PBS discontinued their NRT (non-real-time) file-based services on AMC-21, NR01 and NR02, created as part of the NGIS interconnection system, sometime in Q4 2018.
Phase 2 began in 2020 and is currently ongoing, which according to a May 2021 report from the CPB, "considers future options for the delivery of linear and live content.
The only content left on their three (at the time) primary NPS HD distribution feeds, HD03, HD04, and HD05, was news and public affairs programming.
On January 20, 2023, PBS's main transponder on AMC-21 (which included HD01-HD03, HD06, SD02, SD04, and SD08) began simulcasting on Galaxy 16, a satellite at orbital position 99°W.