Friday, October 16, 1998
Only sports fans can appreciate what satellite TV technology
offers
Medium can’t produce enough quality shows for 900 channels
My roommate really likes football. When I say he likes football,
I don’t mean he’s a casual fan who sits on the couch on Sundays and
roots for his favorite squad. I mean he is incapable of movement
from our living room from daybreak on Saturday morning until Frank
Gifford’s sign-off Monday evenings.
Previously, this behavior was tolerable, because we only got
local cable, so only so many different games were being televised
in a given weekend.
You see, I do not even vaguely resemble a sports fan. I believe
that I was born without a sector of brain, the ‘macho’ sector, that
allows most guys to appreciate organized athletics and cars. These
interests are completely and totally foreign to me, and I find the
goings-on of the NFL about as interesting as a lecture by Ben Stein
on Quaaludes.
This being said, you can understand my initial fear when my
roommate announced he would be purchasing satellite TV for our
apartment. The rationale behind this decision, as far as I can
tell, is that having different football, baseball, hockey and
basketball games playing constantly throughout the entire weekend
just doesn’t provide enough sports entertainment for your die-hard
fan. Your die-hard sports fan needs the option of watching about
10,000 different football games simultaneously, with the added
benefit of having different television networks for golf, stock car
racing and even wrestling  yes, wrestling.
So, soon after we had the friendly (albeit slightly
anti-Semitic) satellite installer venture to our humble abode, my
roommates were indulging in total sports-overload, and I was
discovering the wonder of books and sleep as alternative
entertainment options. However, I knew that all the superfans
couldn’t remain on the couch forever, so eventually I too got a
crack at holding the over-sized remote and browsing the realm of
Direct TV for programming choices.
For the uninitiated, a couple words about what exactly satellite
TV is and how it works: Beats me. Somehow, floating objects in
space manage to coalesce in our television and produce pictures.
Don’t ask me how this works. I’m just a writer.
I do know that the satellite allows us to watch about 900
channels worth of television. Many of these are different Fox
Sports stations from throughout the nation, allowing a football fan
in California to watch the same dull, scoreless football game that
is normally only going to be broadcast to the suburbs of Buffalo,
N.Y. Ahh, technology.
But, sports are not the only channels available. It is also
possible to get about a thousand movie stations, including Starz,
Encore, four HBO’s, five Showtimes, lots of Cinemaxes, and even a
few Movie Channels, each of them showing ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
upwards of 10 times a day. If you are one of the people who
believes that you can’t see ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ enough
times, satellite TV is definitely for you.
In addition to all of these movie channels, almost every cable
station from around the country is shown. So, basically, on top of
the usual crop of cable stations (MTV, BET, TNT and several other
anagrams), we receive, at no extra cost, Animal Planet, MuchMusic,
The Food Network, Court TV and SpeedZone (the car racing network).
To quote Dave Barry, I swear I am not making these up.
Perhaps the most insightful observation I’ve made about
satellite television, (not that this is saying much) is that the
technology is working so much faster than any creativity. We have
the capability to broadcast so much information, but there’s not
nearly enough good ideas for shows to go on these infinite number
of channels. So, while the average cable consumer is provided with
almost 100 channels of crap, we Direct TV users get more than 900
channels of of it!
I’m not positive that this is going to be the wave of the
future, and that in a few years each house will have a
satellite.
Call me jaded, but I’m not positive this technology is useful
for anyone besides the avid sports fan, and those of us who pursue
different forms of entertainment may best be served by keeping our
normal, old, antiquated cable boxes, at least for the time being.
I’d ask my roommate what he thinks, but West Virginia Tech is about
to play Texas S&M, and that promises to be one hell of a
match-up. I doubt I could drag him away.
Harris is a third-year history student.Lonnie Harris
Comments, feedback, problems?
© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]