Hello again. Vacation time is over, but I kept holding off on posting here until there was some good news to report. No one wants to read about such dreary stuff as the St. Louis Cardinals shifting all of their baseball games away from OTA TV, or about the Research Channel going off the air because of University of Washington budget cuts.

This week, that good news arrived. First came word that those same Cardinals had agreed to move their radio contract back to KMOX, an AM station that most of the country can pick up after dark. That’s great for us lovers of free content and nighttime driving trips, but it’s not really FTA TV.

The big news is that BYU’s football team will leaving the Mountain West Conference next year and become independent. (Most of BYU’s other teams will join the West Coast Conference.) The reason we should care is that this gives BYU control over its broadcast rights for football, and indications are that most of the games will be live on BYU TV.

As discussed in stories in The Salt Lake Tribune and BYU’s Daily Universe, this means that BYU will use its successful football team to drive demand for BYU TV, which is already available on Dish Network, DirecTV, and FTA. And that goes along with what I’ve been preaching for years: If you want new viewers to convert to your cause, give them a reason to tune in. We’ll see whether BYU uses the opportunity to promote its other programming during the games.

At a minimum, this means more live major-college sports should be available a year from now on FTA. And we can all give thanks that at least one religious broadcaster understands what it takes to attract viewers.

Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen in Network

“And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”
- Arthur Jensen, “Network”

In my last post, I promised predictions about the future of television viewing. Here’s the first of them, from the eerily prescient film Network. (If you haven’t seen it, run out and buy or rent an unedited, uncensored version. Don’t just watch it on broadcast TV.) When Network came out, according to one source, about 50 corporations controlled the US media. Less than 30 years later, we’re down to six that own the great majority of the TV networks viewed in the US. In general, they will work to ensure that they continue to own all significant sources of TV ad revenue.

I’m not pointing that out to say they’re somehow evil for concentrating network ownership so thoroughly. It’s the duty of a corporation to maximize profits; consolidation decreases redundant expenses and removes competitors. In the absence of legal restraint, it’s only natural for something like this to happen.

Anyway, the most likely scenario is that these huge content owners will continue to be the only source of “new” channels. They’ll populate them mostly by repackaging existing assets, adding just enough original shows to ensure demand. Even the broadcast networks, if they can get enough leverage over their over-the-air affiliates, might switch to national feeds supplemented by local advertising inserted by cable systems.

OR if you’d prefer to think positive, satellite TV may ride to the rescue with something completely different. Think of what Ted Turner accomplished in the late 1970s. He turned a local independent station into a national network. While the times are different now, there aren’t any barriers preventing others from doing the same thing.

The real trick is for a station to own national rights to all of its programming. For college stations, such as those run by the University of Washington and Brigham Young, it’s easy to get a cheap (student) workforce to create lots of content. For others, such as the kinda-comatose White Springs TV, the trick was to use a lot of content that nobody owns. Other national networks with very modest programming budgets include America One, RTV and Tuff TV. (I was going to include old FTA friend AMG, but I couldn’t find any active affiliates for it.)

If you can take that national content and add a very local presence for one underserved home market, then you can create a new superstation, one that relies on local car dealer ads as much as national dishwasher soap ads. Whenever big content owners squeeze out local voices, the new superstation can be there with extensive news coverage, local sports events, and a home-town feel to it. Then that station can go up on satellite to be picked up by FTA viewers, out-of-town cable systems, or both.

Or you can turn that equation upside-down and do it the way a lot of RTV and America One affiliates do it. They create a nice piece of local programming, then rely on the network to fill the rest.

Finally, there’s always FreeDBS. If those folks can really get that project off the ground, it could provide a great example for other folks who want to put something interesting on our TV sets. There’s always hope.

“Something’s comin’ up
And I don’t know what it is
Something’s comin’ up
And I don’t know where it’s gonna take me” –Barry Manilow

My apologies for starting a post with a Barry Manilow lyric. There’s a similar snippet in West Side Story, but that one is more optimistic. “Something’s Comin’ Up” matches what I see – the video viewing world will be much different 10 years from now, but no one knows exactly how it will look. Whether it will be good or bad for us viewers will depend on a lot of factors, especially how fast your internet connection will be.

First comes an amazing story published by Advertising Age. According to report from Horizon Media, the median age for prime-time broadcast TV viewers has gone up by four years during the last four years. That means that there were only as many new, young viewers added as there were older viewers who died. The same median almost-47 year old in 2006 kept watching and became the median almost-51 year old today. (Props to Tod Sacerdoti for mentioning the report on his blog.)

Think about it. This means that very few young people care about broadcast TV. But they do care about the internet. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seems to be recognizing and anticipating this shift, finding wireless internet spectrum from mobile satellite services and setting his sights on taking a chunk away from broadcast TV. The broadcasters are fighting hard against this idea even though they’d get paid for relinquishing the space and that, well, they don’t actually own those pieces of spectrum in the first place.

Second, there’s Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth: A high-end user’s connection speed grows by 50% per year. It used to be crazy to think that every home user could get any channel he wanted, live or on demand, via IP. Now with ever-faster speeds and load-balancing, widely distributed content servers, that’s not so crazy. It used to be easy to say that satellite broadcasting offered the least expensive way to simultaneously reach hundreds of millions of live viewers. At some point, an IP-based delivery system will be cheaper. Already, PBS has announced it will shift some of its non-real-time program delivery from satellite to IP.

Third, more households are cutting back or dropping traditional pay-TV services. A report from Yankee Group said that one in eight would at least cut back in 2010. Add in anecdotal evidence of viewers who are switching to broadcast HDTV with dozens of channels in most markets. With an increasing minority of broadcast TV viewers, maybe it’s not so simple to predict the end of over-the-air TV.

(Or maybe we can anyway. At least one federal spectrum reallocation plan suggested free lifeline cable TV for soon-to-be-former OTA viewers. One TV repeater district servicing far-flung households in rural Nevada suggested switching everyone there to satellite pay-TV.)

So what does it all mean for FTA satellite? Leave a comment and tell me. Meanwhile, I’ve got one crazy prediction that I’ll save for my next post.

Not the right way to point a dish

Just when I thought I had figured out every way to get a dish installation wrong, Mother Nature showed me another one. Earlier this week, some really high winds blew over my primary Ku-band dish, supports and all.

First, some background. When I was just getting started in FTA, I wasn’t entirely sure what would be the best spot in my yard for a dish. On one hand, I needed to secure the dish so it wouldn’t move. On the other, I wanted to be able to move it if I turned out that I had misjudged the angle over the trees to the satellite that I wanted. (This impermanence also improved the WAF for the project. That’s important!)

One day Real Soon Now I’ll lay out all the steps and missteps of those early days, but today you just get a couple of highlights. My first attempt at impermanent dish mounting was a metal pole in a five-gallon bucket of cement. This technique works pretty well with a tiny Dish Network-style dish on a low pole. But for a 76-cm Ku-band dish, I needed a taller pole, and the bigger dish caught more wind. In almost less time than it takes to type, the contraption blew over, bending the dish arm and showing me that an above-ground bucket of cement is insufficient ballast for a high Ku-band dish.

Major Step 2 was construction of a wooden platform to hold the foot of the dish. I took three regular 2x4s and cut them all in half. Laying them out on their sides, I lined up the six pieces so that the outer four formed roughly a square and the other two lined up with the screw holes on the dish foot. After leveling the platform, I screwed them together, screwed the dish foot to the middle pieces, and all was well. The broad, heavy platform kept the dish in one place, especially with it so low to the ground.

A few years later, I upgraded to a 1.2-meter dish. For this taller, heavier dish (with a much heavier pole-foot), I built a larger platform, using 10-foot 2x4s for a roughly 5-foot square. I attached the foot to the north side of the platform, knowing that the prevailing northerly winds could not push the dish forward and down because the attached platform would be in the way.

It lasted for a couple of years that way, until Monday. That’s when freakishly strong winds came from a freaky direction – south. The wind blew the dish backward, taking the platform with it. When the dish landed hard, the platform continued its rotation and smacked down on the dish arms.

It looked awful, but fortunately, there was little lasting damage. The dish foot screws all ripped free of the wooden platform. One of the RG6 cables snapped off at its connector. The plastic LNB holder had broken in two. But the dish, even the support arms were all as good as new. Some Super Glue for the holder, a fresh RG6 cable and new screws on a flipped-0ver platform got the dish back in business. I made sure the platform was level and repointed the dish, and all is well.

What’s the lesson here? If you should happen to choose such an impermanent “sled” platform for a dish, at least get something to fasten down the front of the platform so it won’t flip back. I bought a couple of heavy-duty tent spikes, attached a cable between them, then drove them down far enough so the cable prevents the platform from moving up, but not so far as to force it off level. What you use to keep it down is up to you.

Beware the zombie satellite

Some bloggers make lots of short posts to quickly reflect whatever they care about at the time. So far, I’ve been collecting thoughts and lumping them together. Would you rather see shorter, more frequent posts? Like it the way it is? Leave a comment, please.

* The mainstream media is slowly coming around to reporting the odd problem that is Galaxy 15. About a month ago, April 5, Intelsat lost control of the satellite. That’s not so unusual; all satellites eventually go bad. But when most satellite die, they die. Galaxy 15 isn’t responding any more, but it still thinks it’s alive, and that’s what’s causing the problem.

Galaxy 15 carried some C-band programming, almost all scrambled, which cable TV systems picked up, descrambled, and passed along to their subscribers. You can get a good idea of what it had by seeing what’s on Galaxy 12, the replacement that Intelsat quickly moved into position. Galaxy 15 thinks that it’s still relaying those signals, so it’s continuing to broadcast on similar frequencies.

Without a steady hand to keep it in one place, Galaxy 15 is shuffling over to a Lagrange point, one of those gravitational dips that weakly attract wandering objects. Along the way, it’s going to pass by AMC 11, an SES New Skies satellite that also broadcasts to cable systems on similar C-band frequencies. They’re not too worried about collisions; there’s a lot of room up there, and plenty of time to move out of the way. But Galaxy 15 could get close enough to interfere with AMC 11′s signals. If the satellite operators don’t take corrective action, cable subscribers could have to spend several days without MTV.

For a more thorough discussion of this situation, your best choice is Doug Lung’s updated story in TV Technology.

* My latest tweet (you are following FTAList on Twitter, aren’t you?) concerns the US Court of Appeals ruling on setting damages on satellite piracy. The original case was three years ago, but the appeal was decided yesterday.

A jury found that one sad guy had watched unauthorized DirecTV signals for 435 days, so he was fined $43,500. Another guy had distributed four illegal devices, and he got hit with $44,000.

Not only is piracy unethical and bad karma, it’s also got a terrible risk-reward ratio. But you already knew that.

* When you’re away from your dish, the next best thing is TVU Networks for Windows, iPhone or iPad. You’ll recognize a lot of the foreign-language channels that are available FTA, plus several public-domain movie channels that are almost as good as White Springs used to be. Poke around the long list of channels and check it out.

In a thread in the FTA section of DBSTalk, someone wrote, “I don’t understand why FTA isn’t more popular.” That’s a good question. (Okay, it’s not actually a question, but you get the idea.)

There are at least two good reasons why FTA isn’t more popular. The first is analogous to the difference between paying DVR fees vs. building your own DVR.

The big channel providers (cable, pay-TV satellite) promote their DVRs through lots of advertising. Their monthly DVR fees pad the bottom line, and having lots of stored programming reduces customers’ desire to leave for another provider.

But a savvy viewer could take an ordinary computer, add a card or two and some software, sign up with a free listings service, and create his own DVR with zero monthly fees and full portability.

So why don’t more viewers make their own DVR? Initial cost, time, technical competence, convenience, and promotion. Making a DVR costs a few hundred if you don’t have a suitable spare computer sitting around. It takes time to find and install all the necessary pieces. It takes a small bit of technical competence (or at least technical confidence) to open up a computer and add a card. This is nowhere nearly as convenient as letting the nice installer hook up your ready-to-go DVR. Finally, if you’re a techie, you’ve read stories about home-grown DVRs about a tenth as often as you’ve seen ads for providers’ DVRs. If you’re not a techie, you might never have heard of home-grown DVRs at all.

FTA is very similar. Compared to the millions the big providers pour into advertising, the promotion of FTA shines like a dime on the floor of a treasure vault. It takes real out-of-pocket cash to get started with FTA, and it takes a bit of work and technical competence. But folks who have figured it out know that it’s worth it.

One thing FTA needs is a receiver that’s as easy to use as a cable box. But FTA receivers also need to handle a variety of new and challenging DVB-S2 formats with high bit rates to support true HD programming. Right now, those two goals seem to be incompatible. I’m looking forward to the day when I get a receiver as rock-solid as my old Fortec Star Mercury II, yet able to handle every FTA HD signal that’s thrown at it. Maybe in another year or so?

The second big reason that true, legal FTA isn’t more popular is piracy. In some people’s minds, FTA = piracy. That’s because a lot of pirates use “FTA” to mean pirating signals. Some Dish Network folks talk about a “FTA problem” when they, no doubt, really mean a piracy problem.

FTA feels a little too good to be true. (All these channels, and I never have to pay anyone for them, ever?) Take that thought and add in a distant echo of an old busted-pirate news story or your co-worker’s second cousin’s trailer-park friend, and you’ll get some people who believe that any FTA must be illegal or immoral or something. It’s not entirely logical, but I’ve seen it happen.

Personally, I think the answer is to come up with a new name for legal FTA. Imagine an association of equipment dealers and broadcasters (e.g. FreeDBS, or an reincarnated White Springs) coming up with a trademarked name for watching in-the-clear satellite TV signals. Then maybe we’d start transitioning to a discussion of KleerSat channels.

Earlier this week, I was getting excited about adding a new over-the-air broadcast channel to FTAList. KNWS (Katy / Houston TX) was in the clear on AMC 21, where it joined all those great PBS feeds. But KNWS isn’t a PBS affiliate. It’s thoroughly independent, providing daily doses of The Cosby Show, Rosanne and Cheaters. Just as I prepared to update the database and send a tweet about it, I made one last check. KNWS was gone. Darn it!

And the weird thing is that almost the same thing happened the next day. CNN, of all things, popped up in one of the Veterans Administration slots on Galaxy 18. This time, I knew that there was essentially no chance that this would last long. Sometimes satellite operators copy a signal up through a slot like that just to make sure it’s working, and this looked like one of those times. Still, just as I was about to send a tweet about this one, CNN was gone. Nice while it lasted.

Although I’ve seen similar temporary channels while blind-scanning the skies, these two tips both came from posters at Ricks Satellite forum. Even though I can’t point at a new “permanent” channel right now, at least I can remind you to check Ricks for the latest in temporary channels, especially sports feeds. It’s great for Ku-band, but if you have a big C-band dish, Ricks is as good as it gets.

Echostar's a separate company from Dish, so this photo isn't that relevant. Oh well.

Once again at a big convention, I’ve come up with an idea that has very little to do with the show.

This morning, I watched a presentation about mobile over-the-air TV. After that, I saw the keynote speech by NAB CEO Gordon Brown. (He’s a much better speaker than his predecessor, BTW.) Brown said that the public is better served by keeping broadcast TV rather than turning that spectrum over to wireless internet companies.

And that reminded me of the limited spectrum, the finite satellite positions taken up by pay-TV satellite providers.

By rule, a certain percentage of channels on each satellite have to be for non-profit, public interest programing. NASA TV, Angel One, and C-SPAN are three examples of PI channels.

Did those first two remind you of something? They used to be in the clear until Dish Network scrambled them a few months ago.

Dish interprets the PI mandate to provide them for free but only to active Dish receivers. What if the government wrote a more directed rule that, to provide the widest public service, all PI channels must stay unscrambled for any receiver? We’d get at least a dozen new channels, Dish would lose essentially no subscribers, and all of that public service programming would reach a wider audience. Sounds good to me!

(That photo of the Echostar booth here at the NAB Show isn’t strictly relevant to this topic. I just wanted to post one of the photos I took today.)

Gee whiz, I never expected that I’d be writing so much about the NAB Show. Anyway, the exhibit hall opens next Monday in Las Vegas. Just in case you get a chance to join me there, here’s my survival guide for the NAB and other big trade shows like it.

1. Wear comfortable shoes. This is the highest priority, because if you have bad shoes, it can ruin the whole show for you. You will be walking. A lot. On hard surfaces. Most of the time, when you’re not walking, you’ll be standing. Unless you’re used to being on your feet all day, they won’t be happy with this. Find those comfy shoes now and break them in before you arrive.
2. Have a plan, but don’t expect to stick to it. Make note of the high points that you absolutely have to see. Add some topics that sound interesting, but which don’t have the same high priority. Make a list of exhibitors you want to meet. Then walk onto the floor with the expectation that your schedule may change. There will be a lot of interesting stuff out there, including something you never thought of. Don’t be afraid to set aside what looked good yesterday when you want to learn more about something that’s amazingly cool today.
3. Bring food. It shouldn’t be a lot. A PowerBar or Clif Bar or maybe even a Snickers will do. If you prefer something warm and mediocre, you can take a half hour to wait in line, pay too much, then struggle to find a place to eat lunch. Or you can unwrap a protein bar from your pocket or bag and munch on it as you sit and watch an exhibitor’s presentation. Save your time to visit more booths, and save your money for a real meal after the exhibit hall closes for the night.
4. Get a lightweight map. If there’s an application with a map that you can load on your smartphone, (such as the NAB app), that’s the lightest map you can get. Otherwise, get the map that weighs the least. When you remember that you wanted to visit TooCool’s booth, you’ll want to know where to find it. When you want to find the nearest rest room, you’ll definitely be thankful for the map.
5. Beware of heavy freebies. There are so many great things for free at a big show. Free magazines. Free catalogs. Pens. Paperweights. Bags for carrying them all. You can probably haul around all the pens that you’ll get, but anything that feels a little heavy at 11 is going to be a burden by 4. If you really need that two-inch-thick catalog, plan to pick it up as you leave for the night.
6. Choose your bag well. With all those fliers and freebies, you’ll probably also want a free bag to carry them around. Don’t just grab the first one you see. Make sure your bag is substantial enough to carry the Blu-Ray disc player you hope to win. Make sure it won’t embarrass you because it’s made of coated paper, has a garish promotion on the side, has a long handle made of twine, or all three. Better is a bag made of fabric with a tasteful, colorful logo and a short, strong handle. When you see one of those, grab it fast; those are the bags that run out before the show’s over.
7. Wear comfortable shoes. Seriously.
8. Time your presentations well. If you pass by a booth with a mob standing around watching a presentation that you’d like to see, make a note of when the next showing will be, then keep moving. If you pass by a booth with a presentation that’s going to start in 10 minutes, have a seat if you think it’ll be of interest to you. Use this 10-minute break to check your schedule, check your email, and get friendly with the folks at the booth. You’ll get the benefit of an unobstructed view of a full presentation and your feet will get the benefit of a full half-hour break. Then get up and walk back to that booth you passed, if it’s about 10 minutes before that next showing.
9. For your top priority event, get there early. If your schedule is built around the 2 o’clock show at the 3D Theater, get there at 1:30. If Neil Armstrong is signing moon rocks at 4, get to his booth by 3. If it’s really that cool, it’ll be that popular too, and you’ll probably be waiting in a long line. If there’s no line when you arrive, hang around the neighborhood until it starts to form. If no line ever forms, make sure you’ve got your schedule right; maybe Neil isn’t supposed to sign anything until tomorrow.
10. Drink, especially water. The air is dry in Las Vegas, and hours of walking and standing take more effort than sitting around all day. Dehydration will make you and your muscles feel more tired. When you pass a water fountain, take a drink. Consider bringing a small refillable bottle. And when any exhibitor offers any kind of liquid refreshment, it’s probably a good idea to take it. Come to think of it, that’s good advice on any occasion, isn’t it?
11. Wear comfortable shoes.
12. Wear comfortable shoes. Okay?

NAB past president David Rehr (left) and Mr. Incredible's old boss Gilbert Huph

The NAB Show is just a couple of weeks away, which means that today is about the last time I can talk about the NAB president who presided over the 2009 show. David Rehr probably had some great skills and ideas, but every time I saw him, all I could think of is how much he reminded me of Mr. Incredible’s old insurance company boss Gilbert Huph. He was nowhere near as short as Huph, but he wasn’t tall enough to dispel the similarity. The main thing was that Rehr seemed to be perpetually squinting. When I first saw him on stage, I really thought that someone must have tilted a light in his eyes. Nope. He just looked that way a lot. I hope he’s doing well somewhere else now.

(That photo of Huph, shamelessly copied from my friends at the Internet Movie Database, is © 2004 Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, but I think this is fair use of it. I loved The Incredibles. I saw it in a theater. I bought the soundtrack CD. I bought the DVD. You should too. Please don’t hurt me, oh mighty Disney lawyers. And Rehr’s photo is from last year’s show, only about a month before he resigned.)

The current NAB president is a former US Senator from Oregon, Gordon Smith. He strikes me as someone who has a better chance of persuading Congress to do more of what the NAB wants. Best of all, he doesn’t remind me of any cartoon characters. Maybe I’ll check out his keynote speech.

* The NAB Show exhibit floor opens April 12, and you have until about April 4 to get a free exhibits pass. Stan Lee will be at the NAB Show this year. So will Michael J. Fox, NBC’s Dick Ebersol, lots of 3D demonstrations, and a whole lot of satellite equipment in one place. Just go to the NAB Show site and register with code AM15. Rooms at Circus Circus, the Sahara and downtown are really cheap, and some other rooms in Vegas are really good. Come join me!

If you plan to visit, please drop me a line so we can see if we can get together. I’d love to meet more of the people who read this blog!

* Also please drop me a line if you see any ads on FTAList that link to sites that promote piracy. Most of the ads there come from Google AdSense, a fine program that pays for FTAList’s hosting bills. Unless specified otherwise, any site can bid on ad space, and sometimes pirates have used this process to buy ads on FTAList. I can manually screen out individual sites, but I have to notice them first. If you see a pirate ad before I do, please let me know.

* Lately I’ve been tweeting about the latest advances of Freeview, the UK’s FTA satellite TV service. Every time I post one of those tweets, I think about our old friends at FreeDBS, the group that wants to put a couple dozen channels up on a North American satellite. For a long list of all the puzzle pieces they’ve been assembling, you really ought to visit their site.

I asked Edward Raisley, their technical adviser and a commenter here, if he had anything new to share with you. Raisley said that they’re working on organizing a new mixed martial arts league for the Free Fight channel. That’s the great thing about FreeDBS; it dares to think big. Here’s hoping that we’ll see that channel with a bunch of others some time sort of soon.

What, you hadn’t noticed my tweets? Please follow FTAList on Twitter, then you too can get a few bits of satellite news every week.