Don’t cry for the 500-channel universe.
Yes, it has been supplanted by the Internet as the nation’s buzz entertainment technology.True, those excitable early ’90s saw a lot of rash predictions about the imminence of the idea of one TV channel for every four years since Christ, including, quite possibly, the Every Four Years Since Christ Channel.
And, granted, most cable companies have only been able to stretch capacity to add an extra five or ten channels in that time, leaving their total well shy of one hundred, never mind five.
But even while you’ve turned your attention to the perplexities of home pages, dot coms, and webs without spiders–or cheerfully turned a deaf ear to the computer cacophony–a handful of companies have been firing into space satellites whose function seems to be to test the limits of television tolerance.
In a twist on their old, Cold War image, the spying that these hovercraft enable is from the living room into the outside world, or at least as much of the outside world as television channels choose to document.
I was doing some spying of my own. I watched, intrigued, as the 18-inch-diameter “mini-dish” satellite receivers that are one of the ways to enter that world began to appear in consumer electronics stores, alongside colorful promises of 175 channels, pro sports aplenty, CD-quality sound and more.
I perused the pamphlets and pondered the impact this kind of thing could have on people who, like me, would prefer to give money to a wino on a liquor-store stoop than to their cable company.
And in the name of television, science, intrepid reportage and a guaranteed something to do on a Saturday night, I pounced: I arranged to
borrow one of those dishes and its VCR-like receiver unit from the first consumer company to make them, RCA, and I subscribed to DirecTV and USSB, the two companies that provide the signals designed for the RCA units.
The nutshell version of the mini-dish verdict (though perhaps I should deliver it in a pie chart): While there are many advantages to getting your television from a spacecraft–the chief one being that it means almost never having to listen to your cable provider’s hold music–I can also report with confidence that 175 channels is a whole lot of television.
If you think you feel slothful when you cruise through your current cable offerings, a few months of this will make you examine your hands for signs of rapid hair growth and lengthening fingers. Take the cliche that Bruce Springsteen borrowed for his “57 Channels and Nothin’ On” song and multiply that overwhelmed, undernourished feeling by 3.
Riding this massive wave of channel surfing, I have seen three different portions of the same tennis match simultaneously, simply by pressing buttons on my remote. I have seen six all-news channels even before the U.S. networks join the fray, enough exercise-machine infomercials to bankrupt even the least gullible of paunch possessors, and a seeming tape loop of movies with names like “Vengeful Fists of Brutal Justice,” “Honolulu Sorority Bikini Slumber Party Killer,” and “Midnight Bedroom Passion Eyes IV.”
I have seen every one of the cable channels you have heard of but don’t get, from upstarts like ESPN2 and Turner Classic Movies and Sundance to intermittently available established services like Bravo to 5-channel HBO to the airbrushed, dispassionate raunch of Playboy.
I have not seen something called the Golf Channel, because I refuse to pay DirecTV’s second highest rate ($6.95 per month after Playboy’s $9.95) for a service that gets the tournaments that the networks and ESPN don’t want and is, after all, golf on television.
Nor have I seen one of DirecTV’s most popular and distinguishing features, the extra-cost packages that let you follow one pro sports team in another city (the Boston Red Sox from Chicago, for instance) by hooking you up to regional broadcasts.
And 175 channels isn’t wholly enervating. I have seen, in truth, a whole lot of good, surprising or just fun programming that I wouldn’t have with plain old cable, from a grandmother named Lucille who dispenses car-care advice on Home & Garden Television, to good Canadian movies and continued airing of “SCTV” on our northern neighbors’ Trio channel, to a lot of recent first-run movies on a deep, easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive ($2.99 per) pay-per-view movie menu.
A growth market
Just as a new consumer electronic device in the house means a new remote that is not alone, I am not remotely alone. Direct broadcast satellite, or DBS, is the name that describes one version of this type of TV, and it has taken off like, well, a satellite into space.
With three established competitors operating satellites (the DirecTV/USSB pairing, known as DSS; PrimeStar; and the newer Echostar, marketed as Dish TV) and at least one other on the way, the category has accelerated from 0 to 2.8 million subscribers in this decade, the great majority of them since 1995.
“Everybody has grown at the maximum projected level,” says Lloyd Covens, editor of the trade newsletter DBS Digest. “Nobody has fallen on their face.”
Where outside analysts used to predict the maximum U.S. market for DBS was 6 million households–about one-tenth of the current number of cable households and a little more than one-sixteenth the number of all U.S. TV homes–some have since revised their estimates to 9 million, then 16 and even 18 million.
“You can easily make the case that they are going to take this product on up to 30 million,” Covens says.
DBS was once thought to be primarily a service for people in rural areas where cable wires don’t run, but the actual customer base splits roughly into thirds, he says. Rural, or unwired, America; urban America using DBS to augment cable; and urban America replacing cable with DBS.
Sony and RCA had been the lone makers of the DirecTV/USSB dish and receiver sets for some months, but by the end of the year, nine licensed makers should have products on the market, and prices are expect to fall from the current minimum of about $500 to about $350. (Installation costs run from $150 to $200, though a modestly skilled do-it-yourselfer can probably manage it.) AT&T recently became an equity partner of DirecTV’s and is starting to aggressively market the product.
With a smaller programming menu, a less powerful satellite and slightly lower programming rates, PrimeStar, meanwhile, rents instead of sells its satellite dish, which is bigger than the DirecTV/USSB dishes ($150 to $200 for installation, then about $10 per month equipment charges). Pitching its lower upfront costs than DirecTV, that product is now being marketed in Radio Shacks nationwide.
Service with a smile
Still, 30 million subscribers is a tough number to buy. At their current level, DBS services surpass cable’s in many ways, including sound and, to my eye and that of Consumer Reports (March 1995), picture quality; user friendliness of the system; and customer service.
Indeed, my two favorite DirecTV/USSB features have been the detailed, scrollable, on-screen TV grid, which allows you to press a couple of buttons to summon a screen detailing a program’s stars and plot summary, and the fact that calls to the toll-free customer service numbers are answered quickly by knowledgeable people, who’ll let you do heretofore unimaginable things like turn your service off at no charge when you go on vacation.
They are also a lot more lenient than my cable provider in Chicago about slapping late fees on your bill; on one occasion, I didn’t pay my USSB bill for an entire month, and the next month’s arrived with no late fee. (As near as I can tell, only the unit manufacturer, not the programming providers, knew I was a journalist taking a test drive.)
But because of the technological limits of cable TV’s cables, cable currently lacks the channel capacity to provide the wealth of programming DBS does, DBS systems do have drawbacks, even after the high startup cost.
They are redundant with cable in significant ways (mostly choosing from the same programming pool), more complicated to tape programs from, and greatly inferior to them in one key area. By law, the DBS providers can’t offer local, over-air TV stations such as, in Chicago, WBBM-Ch. 2 and WPWR-Ch. 50. They can make network programming available only to subscribers who live in an area where they can’t get a network signal or–and here’s a significant loophole–those who are willing to lie and say that such is the case. Networks remain an essential part of TV viewing so to get them with DBS, you can (A) be dishonest and get the network feed from a distant city that DirecTV offers or (B) augment your DBS with a basic cable package or (C) use old-fashioned rabbit ears.
(There is also, apparently, a raging technophile debate similar to the CD-vinyl album contretemps. A purist faction contends that DBS’ digital signal isn’t as “warm” or natural looking as the analog picture that comes through a cable. I’ve looked for this on my 10-year-old, 20-inch screen, and cannot see it.)
Occasionally, too, it must be said, the satellite picture will look “digitized” for a second or two–paused and broken into little color blocks–until it corrects itself, which, in my experience, it always has. This is especially likely during rainstorms. Water absorbs some of the satellite signal, and, while in a year’s use I haven’t lost the picture during rain, I have experienced temporary degradations of sound quality so that the programming is no longer in stereo.
Comparing service, offerings
Plucking TV from the stratosphere isn’t cheap. After the heady upfront fees for the system I have, a full menu of programming–including multiple iterations of almost every premium movie channel available, and almost all of the new and established cable networks and music and pay-per-view extras detailed in the next paragraph–runs me about $65 a month.
But cable TV isn’t cheap, either. When I try to cobble together a DBS package that approximates what I pay $35 monthly for in my current cable bill (for the two basic levels plus HBO), the cost is about $48.
But, except for the sacrifice of networks, local stations and local-access cable, the $48 DBS package is much richer. Its extras include five HBO channels, seven Encore and two Disney Channels, some 50 channels of pay-per-view offering movies with staggered starting times and occasionally in letterboxed versions, and an excellent package of music-only channels organized by genre.
The 18-inch satellite dish that pulls in this videoganza is mounted on a south-facing outside wall of my Chicago apartment building (you must have a clear view of the southern sky to use this, as the satellites you pluck the programming from are about 22,000 miles above the Equator, due south of western Nebraska). The dish’s placement, appropriately enough, is opposite my couch.
A small hole drilled through the building’s brick wall allows the signal cable to connect the dish receiver to the signal decoder unit, which is roughly the size and appearance of a CD player, sits in a stack with my other audio/video equipment, and connects to it as readily as a VCR. The unit also connects via telephone cord to my phone line, allowing it to tell headquarters when, for instance, I buy a movie. (Buying a movie is as simple as pressing buttons on your remote.)
The RCA unit comes with an intuitive, neatly laid-out remote control, but that doesn’t stop my wife from resenting it. It’s our fourth, enough to overwhelm even the most expansive coffee table.
The question, after I return this unit to its maker, becomes will I buy one? And the answer is: not at $500, nor even at the predicted year-end $350 or so. The balance between, on the one hand, my dislike for cable and my desire for extra TV, and, on the other, the extra cost, still tips in favor of sticking with cable.
But if the price came down to somewhere around $200, then I would likely cut my cable down to the bare minimum and join the millions of Americans for whom a satellite dish outside no longer signifies that you’re a sports bar or a farmer.
Especially enticing are interactive features that DirecTV plans to add. One would allow you to call up on your TV screen, for instance, Ryne Sandberg’s statistics during a Cubs game. Another would augment your computer modem. Surfing the Internet, you would still send your signal to connect to a Web page via modem, but the information that page sends back to your computer (the slowest part of the process) would come via satellite, at rates much faster than modems allow.
By the time sufficient price drops and service enhancements happen, however, those of us in urban areas, at least (where it makes economic sense to lay new, higher-capacity telephone wire), may well have another option: getting cable TV from the telephone company, bringing a whole new layer of confusion to the simple business of watching television.
TV DELIVERY SYSTEMS: AN ANALYSIS, OF SORTS
Disadvantages
Rabbit-ears: You’ll poke your eye out.
Cable: You’ll trip on the cord.
Satellite: You’ll get called “Joad” by snotty neighbor.
Advantages
Rabbit-ears: Keeps channel surfing to a minimum; money saved can be used for, oh, books.
Cable: The wait for service hookup and a sympathetic boss can be manipulated into two full days off.
Satellite: Receiving transmission from space means wife can no longer laugh when you ask her to call you “Buzz.”
Symbolic foodstuffs
Rabbit-ears: TV dinner.
Cable: Domino’s pizza.
Satellite: Olestra, washed down by Tang.
Enemies
Rabbit-ears: None. Rabbits are friendly.
Cable: Jim Carrey.
Satellite: Rainy days, neighboring buildings that block southern exposures.
Your inner interior decorator says
Rabbit-ears: Antennae also can be used to display your baseball-cap collection.
Cable: Cord snaking along wall gives living room the homey feel of hardware store.
Satellite: A satellite dish outside your house? Why not go all the way and add a lawn jockey, a concrete deer and a rusted pickup truck on blocks?
Service
Rabbit-ears: Stand up, wiggle ears around till fuzz diminishes, sit down again.
Cable: Call, wait, hang up in frustration. Call, wait, hang up in frustration. Repeat until playoffs are over.
Satellite: Hey, buddy, it’s coming from space. What do you want me to do about it?
