In the early 90's, Dave was living in a superb location overlooking an enormous area of southern France, on the flanks of the Pyrenees. It was an excellent location for a Grundig motorized satellite dish that Dave bought, and he spent many hours exploring feeds off the satellites - many of them were free-to-air and unencrypted at that time. One of the greatest jewels he found was The Landscape Channel.

The Landscape Channel was a British television channel set up by Nick Austin, co-founder of the Beggars Banquet record label, to showcase ambient videos set to classical and modern instrumental music. It began airing as an overnight programming block on Sky Channel in 1988 and ran until 1989. In 1990, Landscape provided Channel 4 with 200 hours of morning programming as The Art of Landscape. This precipitated Landscape becoming a dedicated UK cable channel in 1991 on Windsor Television before expanding into Europe in 1993.

On 1 January 2001, Landscape moved to Internet-connected server distribution, allowing cable television providers to broadcast from local servers refreshed via the Internet rather than via traditional more-expensive satellite distribution. Due to a lack of funding, the channel's management was restructured between 2003 and 2007, although it continued to broadcast on the Dutch CAI Westland service.

The channel returned to Sky as a programming block on Friendly TV on 20 October 2003, and the Information TV range of channels in August 2010.

In 1988, Landscape concluded an agreement with SKY Television to provide them with programming through the night on the Eutelsat 13 degrees East satellite.

In early 1989, Landscape joined the exclusive band of broadcasters operating on the new ASTRA 1A satellite, continuing to supply SKY until the middle of that year, when operations ceased due to lack of funds. The Landscape Channel ideal looked as if it would fade, like so many other ideals.

However, fate was to intervene in the form of the UK terrestrial channel Channel Four, who had heard of the good audience response to the programming.

This resulted in Landscape being reconstructed with new investment, to supply the terrestrial television market in a new format known as Art of Landscape.

In 1990 Landscape provided Channel Four with 200 hours of national morning television between 9.30am and 11am.

This earned critical acclaim resulting in Landscape going into the cable market as a dedicated cable channel in 1991.

In January 1991, Landscape signed its first cable operator at Windsor Television, with a view to creating a dedicated cable channel. At the end of 1991 it was airing to approximately 150,000 homes, growing to 75% of all UK cable by the end of 1992.

In April 1993, Landscape took the first step into the European cable distribution business, delivering its programming to cable operators via the Intelsat 27.5 degrees West satellite.

In 1994, Landscape moved to the Eutelsat 13 degrees East satellite and, at the end of January 1997, Landscape was connected to 1,130,000 homes in the UK, representing approximately 60% of all UK cable subscribers.

The Channel launched across Europe on the Orion digital satellite stationed at 37.5degrees West on 1 June 1997. In 1999, Landscape signed a carriage agreement with Spanish satellite operator Via Digital. However carriage was later lost following its merger with D+.

Digital services started in Germany after a number of false starts, with a good response from the German public. Mediakabel in the Netherlands also started digital operations, resulting in Landscape's long-awaited debut on the Dutch cable networks, controlled by one of the most-important cable operators in the Netherlands.

Broadcasting continued in Holland with CAI Westland until 2007. Due to the inability of Landscape’s management to raise funds from its shareholders to continue satellite distribution in 2001, it was necessary to reconstruct the management of the business between 2003 and 2007.

Upon completion of that reconstruction, Landscape Channel became LandscapeHD Limited, with a view to providing the Landscape Channel service in a true high-definition format to the cable and international television business.

What happened after that is unknown to Dave, but the channel no longer exists.

The LandscapeTV.com and LandscapeHD.com domains expired in mid-2014, and are now up for sale.

Thanks to Wikipedia for much of the above history, which you can read at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landscape_Channel

There is an unofficial fan site on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_YPui1LryJ0WoWFrE9AhA It's dedicated site to the team of The Landscape Channel, LandscapeHD and the Chairman of The Landscape Channel, Nick Austin.

There's an Apple Music playlist at: https://apple.co/3pzGL3d Spotify playlists can be found at: https://spoti.fi/2FBlT7r

Official videos used to be posted at: https://youtube.com/user/landscapehd/ - no longer exists. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4p7ten - no longer exists. https://vimeo.com/landscapehd - this does still exist, but seems to be no longer maintained.

To the memory of The Landscape Channel and the beautiful ideals it embodied.