Liberty, one channel that mixes in secular programming

Religious broadcasters, of which there is no shortage on FTA, could grow their flocks while making the world a better place if they’d only make one small change: Add a bit of secular programming.

This is not a new idea. Pat Robertson’s original CBN Satellite Service slowly evolved into The Family Channel, then Fox Family, and now ABC Family. Along the way, CBN grew a hugely profitable network and eventually retained a prime slot for its 700 Club program. A big part of the success story was the mixture of carefully selected secular programming with religious shows.

Have other religious channels taken note of this successful formula? Not so much. Most religious channels carry nothing but religious programming. For those who believe in that particular flavor of religion, that might be very comforting, but for everyone else, it’s like a continuous infomercial.

I often hear that a primary mission for these channels is evangelism, carrying their message to those who don’t already believe it. Well, the first step of evangelism is to lure these non-believers into your tent, and the way to do that is to offer something that they want to watch. Once a secular viewer has tuned in, a channel can use commercial breaks to talk about other shows that could help fill a need in the viewer’s life. Or the commercials could be for the attractive elements of some religious show. Or the channel could just take advantage of the secular lead-in to whatever religious show follows. In any event, a channel with occasional secular programming will not be a channel that non-believers  automatically skip.

There are a few channels with the right idea. Start with the Liberty Channel, which I have to admit isn’t on FTA these days. Check Liberty’s program guide. There are game shows, cooking shows, college sports, classic TV, secular movies, and a generous serving of religion. Then look at BYU’s schedule. They’ve got college sports, musical performances, and Discussions on the Book of Mormon. These are both university stations, but there’s no reason why Daystar or 3ABN couldn’t run an afternoon movie or episodes of Bonanza.

Everybody wins when religious broadcasters add secular programming. Broadcasters get the opportunity to present their message to a new audience. Viewers can discover a new way to improve their well-being. Even hard-core non-believers will enjoy being able to watch shows that they like. In all, it would fulfill another primary goal of most religions: It would make the world a better place.

Just a short note to remind you that Daylight Savings Time begins for most of us this Sunday. Our weekend will be shortened, and we won’t get that hour back until October. At least the snow is melting and the flowers are thinking about blooming.

In particular, changing from standard to daylight time always makes the TV listings a little wacky. Different channels have different ways of expressing how they’re handling the 23-hour day, and the listing services don’t always translate it correctly. So if you’re in the habit of checking the movies & sports page to see what’s coming up, you might want to take those listings with an extra grain of salt. Or maybe with an extra hour, one way or the other.

A list from FTA's glory days

I was cleaning up some old bookcases when I came across a laminated FTA channel chart that I had made years ago. Back then, I was checking to see whether a commercial printer could do a particular kind of job, and I needed a test page to be printed in color and laminated. I used a list of channels the way I had ordered them on my FTA receiver. The result is over there next to these words.

What I didn’t know then was that I just happened to capture the absolute peak of FTA. Although it was almost all from one satellite, Galaxy 10R at 123 W, this was the very best lineup of Ku-band channels that would ever be available.

First there were the Caribbean channels, with ABC, CBS, NBC, and a WB/UPN hybrid. That set only stayed on G10R Ku-band for a few months, but while they did, they were a rare source of CBS and NBC programming.

This lineup still included The Tube and ImaginAsian. The former was a real music television service for grown-ups, and was founded by one of MTV’s old creators. The latter had interesting martial arts movies and was adding a fun MST3K-like show. Both eventually left Ku-band, then died months later.

And there were all those great OTA stations. Two ABC affiliates from Wyoming, usually showing the same thing. Three Fox affiliates, often showing three different pro football games. Three WBs, six UPNs, and six more showing that new upstart network RTN.

With that many quasi-independent stations, there was a lot of syndicated and sports programming as well. KQUP would show an amazing number of Seattle Sonics games every season. St. Louis and Kansas City baseball games were common. WNGS sometimes had four baseball games from three home teams in one week. And some seasons even saw some Texas Rangers and Houston Astros games.

I often wondered if these channels were sustainable FTA. That is, if enough people learned about them and started watching, would the networks and sports leagues force them all to go scrambled? This question was never answered; those stations went away in the wake of Equity Media‘s financial implosion. (Except for KUIL, which coincidentally left FTA soon afterward.)

I even miss the Spanish-language channels, even though I couldn’t understand them. It annoyed me to see so many channels with exactly the same programming, but at least there were occasional sports on the Univision and TeleFutura channels.

Today, all that’s left from this list of 42 channels is the Research Channel, the University of Washington, the Pentagon Channel, and Daystar. It’s nice to have something, but it’s fun to remember when we FTA viewers had everything.

The perfect complement to FTA TV is over-the-air (OTA) TV, and OTA is under attack. The FCC is talking about selling some of the OTA TV spectrum to folks who will use it for broadband internet. An op-ed column in The New York Times last week suggested that we should sell off all OTA TV spectrum. For folks who get free TV now, the column says that most can get cable or satellite pay-TV, then suggests that the FCC could require “a low-cost service that carries only local channels.”

This is crazy on several levels. Folks who love high-quality video know that OTA HD is usually much better than what cable or satellite provides. Folks who honestly cannot afford to waste even $20 a month on TV entertainment will not benefit if their free TV is taken away from them. And the idea that weather emergencies are best communicated via cable? When I had cable, the way I knew there was a storm in progress was that my cable had cut out.

There are some people who really want to get all of that juicy, wall-penetrating TV spectrum to use for their own commercial projects. Those airwaves belong to all of us, and I don’t want to see free OTA TV go away just to enable the latest internet access flavor of the month.

And while I’m talking OTA, another hot topic is retransmission fees. If a cable or satellite TV company wants to carry an OTA station, it has to pay a fee that it negotiates with that station. (If the company doesn’t want to carry an unpopular station, then the station can insist to be carried for free.) Every time the retransmission contracts come up for renewal, there’s a good chance for public posturing and the occasional loss of a channel to the company’s subscribers.

I’ll skip over the idea that because OTA stations use our public airwaves at very little cost, maybe they should be free to everyone. Given that retransmission fees are appropriate, the current system is inefficient and hurts viewers. The chairman of the Senate Communications Subcommittee says maybe a station should have to show that the cable or satellite company is bargaining in bad faith before it yanks its signal away. That’s not the right answer, either.

When an internet broadcaster streams music, it doesn’t have to negotiate with each song’s publisher. When a jukebox operator changes records, it doesn’t have to figure how much to pay each songwriter. The stakeholders in these cases negotiated mechanical royalties, ensuring that all sides get fair terms without having to bargain about every transaction.

That’s exactly what retransmission consent needs: a negotiated national contract. Fees could be based on size of market, audience share, the end-user’s bill, or any other appropriate factors. It could be tied to the cost-of-living index, it could have negotiated yearly increases, or it could just be reopened for fresh national negotiations every five years or so. The stations would get what’s fair, cable and satellite companies would get some cost assurance, and viewers could be sure that they’d get all the local channels that they’d paid for. Too easy?

We kept the same front-page logo

After much too much time finding problems and overcoming them, I’ve got FTAList.com version 2.0 available for public viewing. Just click this link to go directly there. Anyone using old .htm links will still see the old site, but you know better now, so you can see the new stuff.

The new site has a glossary (thanks for the suggestion), a troubleshooting section, and a fresher, cleaner look. The channel lists are now served dynamically, which means no more waiting for daily page updates.

The time spent getting everything updated has come at the expense of the channel updates (if that makes any sense), so the next few days will be spent getting that back under control. For example, ION (ion? Ion?) is apparently scrambled now.

Please go take a look and report any problems. The only one I’ve noticed so far is a problem with the borders of Deal of the Day in the front page using Internet Explorer 7. (Gotta fix that!) There are bound to be more, so either leave comments about them or use the Contact page (just fixed that one) to drop me a line.

Two fairly recent satellite books

There’s a real need for an updated, reader-friendly book about the state of satellite TV, especially for us FTA viewers. In the continuing quest to find this book, I read a couple of small editions that attack the topic from different directions.

The most interesting was Start a TV Station by Brock Fisher. This is a very small book. It’s just 77 pages, and those pages are just 5.25 x 7.75 inches. To put that in perspective, the user manual that came with my most recent FTA receiver was half an inch wider, half an inch taller, and 108 pages. It appears to be a print-on-demand book; mine included the date I ordered it on the back page.

But it’s selling pretty well, a few dozen a year on Amazon alone. It addresses a wish that pops up again and again in my emailbox: How can I start my own satellite TV channel? As he promotes his web site (www.tvstartup.com) as a one-stop shop, Fisher lays out the pieces you’d need to get your satellite channel going. He also discusses alternatives via OTA broadcast and internet streaming. And the best part is that he includes ballpark price estimates with all of these pieces, so the reader can start to get a handle on what it’ll take to get started.

There are problems with the book. The text and illustrations are frequently amateurish. The first word in the book is misspelled. The first picture is a poor screenshot of a LyngSat channel page. Typos and awkward grammar litter the whole book. The book ends without a summary; it flows straight from the last chapter to the glossary. And it’s not cheap; you’ll pay around 50 cents for each tiny page of content.

Yet there are signs of an author who might know what he’s doing. For example, Fisher points out that if you choose a satellite that’s already popular with FTA viewers, you’ll have a larger initial potential audience. If you’re hungry for this kind of information, then maybe you’re willing to forgive the medium and buy this book for the message.

The other book was The Satellite Technology Guide for the 21st Century by Virgil S. Labrador and friends. Compared to the first book, it seems as huge as an encyclopedia, but it’s really just 200 pages and only a bit taller.

The Guide has lots of problems, too. First is its odd, distracting font with hyphens, colons and semicolons that float much higher than normal. Labrador’s chapters, the meat of the book, are very short. For example, he summarizes the history of satellite communications in nine illustrated pages. While not at Fisher’s level, the text is often awkward, and occasional typos pop up. The longest chapter, on VSATs (Very Small Aperature Terminals, the two-way satellite communication you see at some gas stations, for example), was written by a guy who has a company that sells VSATs.

This book is better written and less expensive, but who is its audience? Executives who need a really quick overview of the industry? Curious hobbyists who want a short description of the technology? I mean, I’d like to read Labrador’s earlier Heavens Fill with Commerce, which apparently spends a whole book on satellite history. Maybe this example applies to the rest of the Guide – for each section, you can probably find a better, more thorough treatment elsewhere.

No two ways about it, I need to write an FTA book later this year. What chapters and topics do you think it should cover? Post a comment and let me know.

Two backyard C-band dishes

There’s a thread over at DBSTalk that references a SkyReport note that says that a guy at National Programming Services said that Motorola said that they’d stop providing pay-TV programming to C-band viewers. (And I’ll send a prize to the first person to correctly diagram that sentence.)

This note revived the recurring theme that this is The End for C-band dishes. Previous versions of The End came when ESPN left and when NFL Sunday Ticket left. And if you really rely on C-band for your pay-TV programming, it would change everything if Motorola really shuts down its authorization stream.

But other posters in the thread claim that it’s all a ploy by NPS to convert its customers to Dish Network and pocket the referral fees. Other C-band programming vendors such as Skyvision are still offering annual contracts. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

From a FTA perspective, if you’re not a C-band subscriber, this isn’t so bad. Remember that C-band is where FTA got started, in the days when everything was unscrambled. Then C-band dishes sprouted in back yards, then cable TV operators began getting annoyed; they persuaded the senders to scramble most signals. Viewers eventually shifted to cable or small-dish pay-TV, and the C-band dishes shriveled (ok, rusted) away until only a small fraction of them remained in operation.

Perhaps as a result, now there’s an amazing array of sports feeds and other stuff on C-band if you’ve got a capable HD FTA receiver. You can visit Ricks Satellite Forum to see what’s been available in recent weeks. For regular channels in the clear, there’s always the great C-band list at Global Communications.

Maybe when pay-TV subscriptions on C-band finally pass away, a few more dishes will come down. (Which will be more used C-band dishes on the market. They’re already pretty cheap.) Maybe it will also mean that broadcasters and cable systems will worry less about the dishes that stay up. And then maybe we’ll see more and more content in the clear on C-band.

The relaunch of FTAList is really close now. The completely redesigned database is working well, and the new basic page layout is ready. I had hoped for a Feb. 1 relaunch, but now it looks like it might slip a few days past that. It’s just as well, because it would be great to get more input about what features and directions it should go.

First, a few background notes. Although the new database is set up to include them, there won’t be any C-band listings … yet. There will be a Troubleshooting page to address the most common problems that FTA viewers run into. Each channel list page will include a notes section, where you can read about recently lost channels, for example.

But here are some questions that you can help answer:

• Should we recognize channel updaters? Some folks are nice enough to pass along reports of channels that they’ve found. Should they be recognized on the channel list the way that LyngSat does it?
• In what ways should the lists be sortable? By name, of course. By language (for satellite pages). By satellite (for language pages). Probably by transponder (on satellite pages only). Maybe a selectable include / don’t include circular-polarity channels button? What else?
• What to do with the Movies & Sports page? Back in the glory days of a couple dozen OTA channels on FTA, it made a lot of sense to use the Movies & Sports page to round up the sports and movies that they’d have available. With those channels gone, do you still want to see this roundup? If so, which channels should be included?
• Should we have a forum? There are any number of fine online forums where you can discuss satellite TV. Do we want one more just because it would be the official FTAList forum?
• What else? No single person ever has as many good ideas as the group has together. What other ideas do you have to improve FTAList? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

My early-morning scribbles at CES

In the middle of the night after my first day at the CES show floor this year, I woke up with a vision. If you put a cluster of attractive free-to-air channels together on one transponder, that would make a much more sustainable business plan than for any single channel. I was so inspired that I scribbled down some notes for some free channels ideas, and that’s the photo* to the right of this paragraph. But I didn’t mention it to anyone.

Anyway, the following week, a group called FreeDBS announced that they’re actually going to try to do just that. What a fun, almost spooky coincidence! Their web site lists a channel chart that looks a lot better than mine, although the lineup is certain to change by the time it launches. For now, it even includes The Golden Age of Movies, which is the new name for White Springs TV.

However it happens, this could be a nice boost to FTA receiver sales. In the first days of radio, some of the commercial stations were created and funded by the companies who made radio sets, because content is the key to sales. Here’s hoping that something good comes out of this.

Since we get to watch its formative stages, maybe this is the best time to make channel suggestions that aren’t on the FreeDBS list yet. The channel would have to own national rights to its content, eliminating most OTA TV stations.

Most of these suggestions involve channels that are already available in the clear on C-band:

• Classic Arts Showcase. CAS will give permission to almost anyone to rebroadcast its channel. I find it very relaxing. It’s also available on Dish Network to anyone with an active Dish receiver.
• America One. Years ago, a Netflix-wannabe called GameZnFlix had a great idea. It took a Ku-band slot on the international satellite at 97 W (then Intelsat Americas 5) and carried all of America One’s programming, but it used all the “local” ad slots for GnF ads. But after a month or two, GnF switched to its own mix of low-budget movies that it licensed inexpensively. I’d love to see the national A1 feed on Ku-band or maybe another similarly sponsored virtual station.
• AMG TV. This is another A1-type network, but without as much team sports. We had a nice preview of it when several former RTV stations switched to AMG in the months before they vanished from Galaxy 18.
• Blue Highways. It’s not on C-band, but it’s prominently featured on TVU. Music, country, and country music.
• The Liberty Channel. (on IP-based Sky Angel) Hear me out on this. This channel includes a surprising amount of college sports, more than BYU. It shows a secular movie every weekday afternoon. And it’s a good candidate to be able to contribute financial support to ensure the wider reach that a project like FreeDBS can provide. Sure we’ve already got a lot of religious channels on Ku-band, but this might be a good fit.

Now it’s your turn. If you know of a channel that would be a good fit on FreeDBS, add a comment here to tell us what and why. Maybe it’ll be on FTA some day.

(*BTW, the other note on that page was from the second day as I was watching a discussion with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. He said that the reason the V-chip in TV sets isn’t used by most consumers is that when something is required by the government, then there’s no reason for third-party sellers to promote that feature, so fewer people are inspired to use it. That’s a good argument in favor of choices rather than mandates.)

Hollywood Classics 100 Movie Pack

The most common topic in the FTAList inbox for the past three months has been White Springs TV. Where did it go? When will it come back? As was written here, this fine 24-hour movie service says it suffered some sort of catastrophic failure on October 1, and we haven’t seen it on any satellite since then.

About a month ago, I sent them an email to say that I wouldn’t be adding any new programming grids for White Springs after the first of this year until WSTV became a FTA channel again. At that time, they said that they were hopeful of arranging financing to return to a different satellite. And that’s the last I’ve heard from them.

I would really love to see White Springs return to satellite, but we should face the reality that it’s gone and may never return. So here are some alternative ways for you to satisfy your public-domain movie cravings.

• Public-domain movie box sets. The DVD set pictured here, Hollywood Classics 100 Movie Pack, is just one example of the many sets that Mill Creek Entertainment has produced. If you search Amazon for 50, 100, or 250 movie packs, you’ll find plenty more. (And if you buy something through these Amazon links, I get a small commission.) There are about a dozen 50-movie packs on my shelf at home. Their movie lists are strikingly similar to the list of movies shown by White Springs. Search online for the best price, or get more than $25 of them from Amazon to get free shipping. (They’re bulky, of course.) When you have a few of these, it’s almost as good as WSTV, and without commercials.
• The Internet Archive. Archive.org is a great free resource in any number of areas, but what’s relevant to this discussion is its movie archive. It lists over 1,800 feature films for downloading or streaming. While there’s some overlap, this is a different set of movies than what Mill Creek provides.
• TVU Networks. As was said here earlier, TVU is a delivery system for a remarkable array of programming choices. Among those choices are several public domain movie channels, most named Nostalgia or PDTV. If you prefer being surprised rather than choosing your movie, this would be a good source for you. You’ll need to install a special browser plug-in or run the TVU application separately. And if you don’t mind streaming movies on your computer, that brings us back to …
• White Springs TV online. Yes, there’s nothing more like White Springs than White Springs itself. Its online stream (direct link) uses Windows Media Player, so there’s no need for special plug-ins. And who knows, maybe one of these days they’ll update the WSTV web site with more information about their comeback. If you keep checking, you might be the first to know.