As mentioned multiple times within this site, I started out my technology journey with Nintendo products. At some point in 2018, I won two Super Famicoms from a Japan eBay auction, and those would have been my very first Japanese video game consoles. Right before COVID-19 locked down the whole world (March of 2020), I received my Satellaview from another eBay auction in Japan, and spent a copious amount of time trying to compile as much as I could about what it was, why it was such a unique piece of gaming history, and eventually building up a working demonstration unit (except for an actual broadcast) that I will be displaying at future events.
I should mention before I go any further that a lot of facts, information, and figures are research by Yakumono aka LuigiBlood and others at the BS-X Project. I wouldn't know as much as I do without your help.
A Brief History
The year is 1991, and Nintendo is riding high in the world of video games. A recent partnership between fellow Japenese company Sony and Nintendo seems to be promising compact disc support for the Super Famicom console. However, when contracts fell through and the fallback partnership with Philips produced nothing more than Hotel Mario and some Zelda games on a console that is hardly a footnote outside of early YouTube sentence mixing, Nintendo went back to flying solo. Around this same time in 1994, the radio broadcast company St. Giga was falling on hard times, thanks to the recession in Japan killing the sales on their Nature Sounds music. Nintendo decided to purchase a stake in the company, and began producing a peripheral for the Super Famicom compatible with St. Giga's services. The result was the Satellaview: A digital satellite receiver that was capable of downloading games to a flash cartridge and play radio-quality audio from a live broadcast.