Rediffusion

The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, the first ITV (commercial television) franchisee to go on air in the UK.

With the passage of the Television Act 1954, Rediffusion joined forces with Associated Newspapers, a subsidiary of Daily Mail and General Trust, to form Associated-Rediffusion, and won the coveted London weekday ITV broadcast franchise.

During the partnership's first year, Associated-Rediffusion was losing money so fast that by the end of 1956, Associated Newspapers sold 80% of its stake back to BET and Rediffusion at a severe loss.

Around this time, Associated-Rediffusion struck a very lucrative deal with Granada Television, the franchise holder for weekday broadcasts in the North of England.

[8] By 1964, when Associated-Rediffusion changed its name to Rediffusion London, the efforts of the owners had left them sitting on a substantial cash pile, and it is arguable that this success may have led to the 1967 decision by the Independent Television Authority to effectively break up the company.

Selection of TV or radio station was by means of a rotary switch, usually mounted on a wall or window frame close to the point of entry of the cable into the home.

The TVs used on this system were stripped-down TV sets with no tuner or RF front-end and the radios were little more than a loudspeaker with a step down transformer and volume control.

The wall mounted switches, external junction boxes and street cable ducts are still visible in places that have not been redeveloped since the late 1980s.

The Rediffusion retail chain, renting and servicing TVs, radios, VCRs and hi-fi systems, was common on high streets until it was bought by Granada Rentals in 1984.

It initially started in the production of analogue computers to control flight simulators, then moved to produce minicomputers ("R range"), departmental Unix Servers and microcomputers ("teleputers"), specialising in data capture, enterprise accounting for local government and videotex systems.

From 1980, the company designed, manufactured, sold, installed and maintained online shopping systems mainly in the UK and achieved a significant number of world firsts.

Equipment that met the CoCom directive for the sales of high performance technology to the Soviet Bloc was supplied to a number of customers the largest of which was Gazprom who used the systems on the Siberian Gas Pipeline project.

[13] In addition there was a steady stream of Polish engineers attending the Crawley training facility to enable them to support and maintain this equipment mainly in Russia but also in other countries in the Eastern Bloc.

Reditronics Jersey was sold to SCK Holdings Limited in 1986, and following BET's retreat from cable and the consequent loss of associated contracts, it ceased trading in 1987.

In 1991, a Hong Kong-based branch of the company, now known as Asia Television, returned telerecording copies of all four episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen, a Doctor Who serial, to the BBC.