Al Jimenez misses the Philippines. The Crystal Lake resident moved to the United States five years ago and still feels pangs of loneliness for his native country.
In November, he bought a remedy for his homesickness. A small satellite dish now sits on his back porch and allows him to watch Filipino television whenever he chooses. On Sunday afternoons, Jimenez can be found catching up with news or watching entertainment talk shows from home.
“This is the closest he could get to being back in the Philippines,” said Candie Jimenez, who left the Philippines 20 years ago and doesn’t suffer the same homesickness her husband does. “Sometimes I’ll sit and watch for an hour or two, but I don’t know half the people on the talk shows since I’ve been here longer, so it doesn’t mean as much to me. He’s really enjoying it though.”
Hans and Anna Bittenbinder of Park Ridge bought a satellite dish last year, 40 years after they moved to the U.S. from Austria. They decided to subscribe to a German satellite television channel to strengthen their connection with their native language and to get more than the American view of world news.
“We wanted to keep up with what’s going on in the world,” Anna said, “and just keep up our language. We watch news and travel shows, and we like the music programs and youth programs.”
The number of satellite dishes on roofs and in back yards has been growing significantly in the last few years, and many of those customers are asking for ethnic broadcasting from their homelands.
Bob LeBurkien, owner of Raybar Enterprises in Wheeling, said about one-third of his calls for small-dish installations are from people looking for ethnic programming. “There’s a big call for Middle Eastern now, Indian/Asian programming, and also Greek,” he said. Other local dish retailers say other popular programming options are Italian, Russian and German and those from the former Yugoslavia.
Joseph Herreweyers, vice president of E&E Systems Inc. in Wauconda, estimates that his firm will install 500 dishes this year, up from 250 last year.
“My most unforgettable work experiences have involved installations for people who wanted live feeds from Belgrade,” Herreweyers said. “These were people from the former Yugoslavia who had relatives there and wanted to know everything going on. I really felt I was providing them with a lifeline.”
Roughly 40 foreign channels are available nationwide, according to Margaret Parone, vice president of communications for the Satellite Broadcasting Communications Association in Alexandria, Va. She estimates channel capacity for larger dishes will be 1,000, for smaller dishes 300.
“Sports is an important attraction for foreigners,” she said. “It gives them a home-away-from-home flavor. We’re also seeing increased interest as the population of the country becomes more diverse and the cultural needs of that diverse population must be met.”
The growing number of immigrants is only part of the reason for the sprouting of dishes throughout the suburban landscape. Several years ago the only satellite option was a dish 5 feet tall that had to be camouflaged in back yards by shrubbery so as not to upset neighbors or local zoning ordinances. These days dishes are as small as 18 inches. The Bittenbinders have their little dish on their roof.
And these little dishes are powerful. Ethnic programming used to be available only on the bigger dishes. “Now, though, they’re coming out with foreign (programming) on the mini-dish,” said Tina Looke, who owns Superior Satellite in Palatine with her husband, Randy.
“It’s a booming business right now,” added Looke, who says there’s one request she hasn’t been able to fulfill: “You don’t know how many calls we’ve received for Polish (programming), but the satellite doesn’t carry it.”
The satellite equipment costs anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars, Looke said, and then there’s the monthly programming costs. Some ethnic channels are available as part of a complete satellite system; other ethnic channels must be subscribed to separately. The Jimenezes, for example, subscribe only to the Filipino channel.
Midwest Ethnic Broadcasting in Wheeling is the Midwest franchisee of a national company that specializes in providing ethnic satellite television, said president Murray Karbin. Along with the standard American programming, Midwest Ethnic offers separate subscriptions for niche broadcasting in Russian, Filipino, Italian and Arabic. It plans to offer Chinese and Indian/Asian in the near future.
Midwest Ethnic has sales reps who speak the languages of its customers and also produces its own Russian programming in a television studio in New Jersey. It produces 24 hours a day of Russian cultural, news and talk shows.
“Niche programming is going to be the key (to satellite television),” Karbin said. “You talk to people who have been here 20, 30 years and they still talk about their homeland. They don’t want to let their language die, and many of them hunger for sports from home. This gives them a little bit of their home country in our country.”
Although residential requests are the bigger portion of the satellite business, dish retailers also say they get business from schools that use satellite equipment for educational programming and from restaurants and bars that want expanded sports programming. Those bars, though, pay a commercial rate for the service that’s well above the residential rate.
Foreign soccer is a big draw for residential customers, said several dish retailers. And at the Green and White Soccer Club clubhouse in Mt. Prospect, there’s a big dish that allows the children in the program to watch soccer from around the world.
“After training or after games, we can watch games from all over Europe, and we also see games played by the professional teams in the United States,” said Green and White treasurer Fred Becker of Northbrook. “This is educational, and it helps promote the sport.”
Residential customers also are attracted by the crisp picture of satellite TV. “The quality of the audio and video is far superior to over-the-air broadcasting, and the programming content is a lot more diverse,” said Lee DePrey, owner of JKL Communications in Schaumburg.
For the dish to work well and get good reception, though, there has to be an unobstructed line of sight up to the satellite.
And depending on the suburb, there are various ordinances that dictate how homeowners must hide their dishes. Fred Rodey, owner of Phoenix Satellite Systems in Palatine, said the little dishes these days can go almost anywhere, but the bigger ones can create headaches. He installed one dish in Barrington Hills that required the homeowner to spend more on shrubbery than on the system.
“Some people have just said, `Forget it,’ when they find out what they have to do,” Rodey said. “And others are willing to do whatever it takes.”
