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.)

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.

Every time I visit the State Fair, I see folks selling Dish Network, and I see folks selling DirecTV. It seems to me that this would be a great opportunity for someone to sell FTA.

Just imagine the crowds of fairgoers walking past a sign that said “$0 TV subscription fees – Forever!” Imagine a table with monitors showing recordings that cycled through many of the channels that are available on Ku-band. (Unless there were room for a dish with a line of sight for live demonstrations.) Imagine handout lists of available channels.

Then imagine boxed kits that would be available at a decent price, including a nice profit. They would include everything that a handy homeowner would need, plus the contact information of some local installers, just in case. Or maybe the seller is also an installer, soon to become a very busy installer.

Maybe it’s too late for you to get a state fair booth this year, but another place and time this would work is at upscale shopping malls during the holiday season. Sell the same package the same way from one of those middle-of-the-aisle kiosks. So many upscale shoppers are desperate for something fun that their recipients haven’t already bought for themselves. Some would love the gift of free TV that they can’t get anywhere else.

In either case, I think that any dealer who rented the space would soon have more business than he could handle. And maybe that’s why I never see an FTA booth at the State Fair.

The traditional spiral used for starting blogs.

Now that we’re done getting up to date about the sad loss of so many OTA broadcasters from Ku-band, I suppose that I ought to introduce myself. I’m Michael Kilgore, owner and operator of FTAList.com. Glad to have you join us.

Please feel free to add your comments to any post here. I’ve been trying to get the settings tweaked to allow normal comments while rejecting spam attempts, which seem as ubiquitous as mold spores. You might have to wait for approval, or it might accept your comment right away, but I hope that you give it a shot when you have something to say.

One friendly soul wrote to point out that the posts from the previous FTAList blog weren’t available any more. Thank you, it’s flattering to hear that someone actively wants to read something that I wrote months or years ago. If you’re really interested in that old stuff, you can find it here.

In the coming weeks, I plan to add the cautionary tale of How I Got Started in FTA, (or how to make every possible mistake once), as well as stuff about TV and satellites in general. Unlike my favorite blog, News From Me, I won’t write about raccoons in the back yard or national politics. I don’t have raccoons, and I prefer to bury my head when it comes to politics. We’ll just have to see what’s interesting.

A calm vista of a lake and a snow-capped mountain

Hi there. I’ve been meaning to restart this blog as soon as there was some good news to talk about. Unfortunately, it’s been a long wait, and all the news has been pretty bad. So let’s all take some deep breaths, concentrate on quiet, happy thoughts, and take an assessment of what’s happened lately and what’s likely to come up in the near future.

First, there’s Galaxy 18 at 123° W, previously home to Galaxy 10R. It used to have a couple dozen over-the-air (OTA) broadcast stations, owned or operated by Equity Media and its predecessors. Equity had a cool idea: Do the production work for all of these stations from one central location, then beam the signals to the stations for OTA broadcast. It had a second good idea: Use this testbed of independent stations to find the beginnings of a good, inexpensive TV network. Thus was born the Retro Television Network. These stations made Ku-band FTA a lot of fun for those of us who enjoy a variety of English-language, secular programming.

Last year, some sort of financial problem developed. (Maybe it had something to do with buying lots of little TV stations?) Equity sold RTN for some cash. It sold another station or two for cash. And still, by the end of 2008, Equity Media found itself in bankruptcy court. The filings suggested that they owed money to RTN’s programming providers, to the satellite operators, and more. After a couple of months, Equity was forced to sell essentially all of its stations to pay its creditors.

The new owners for each of these stations had to wait a few months for the paperwork to make its way through the FCC offices. Once each new owner took control, it had no need for Equity’s production and distribution service, so it took that channel off the satellite feed. G18 looked like a dying shopping mall, with stores closing one by one. Finally, the Equity transponders went dark.

Several people have written to ask when those stations will return to G18. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think that anything like that will come back. Ever.

Just as we were getting used to that, KUIL decided to leave AMC 4. KUIL had been on satellite for years. The story is told that it was spun off from its Lake Charles LA parent Fox station just so Beaumont TX viewers could watch Dallas Cowboys games. Fox moved its affiliation to another Beaumont station last year, and KUIL continued as an independent. I presume that KUIL was using the satellite feed to beam its signal from its station to nearby cable systems. Once Dish Network picked up KUIL in its local market, that feed wouldn’t be necessary. It’s gone now, and as with the former Equity OTA channels, there’s no reason to think it’ll ever be back.

(Update: Someone forwarded me an email that said that KUIL was using the satellite to send its signal from Lake Charles to Beaumont. According to the email, they switched because they found a cheaper way to send it.)

There, that’s the end of the bad news. Now let’s try to look on the bright side.

There are still a lot of sporting events available on FTA, but they’re just harder to find. My favorite place to look is Ricks Satellite Wildfeed and Backhaul Forum. Some of those feeds require an HD receiver, but we’ll all need one soon anyway.

There’s a lot of educational programming on FTA, from PBS to community colleges to the University of Washington. There are a lot of alternative news shows. White Springs is still going strong with its old movies. RTN is now RTV, and if you’ve got a large enough dish, you can watch its national feeds. You can even find a few pay-TV networks that have stayed in the clear longer than I expected.

You might even want to check some of the foreign-language channels. Some look nice, some look bizarre, and some look like bad community-access TV. The sports are interesting, the dubbed or subtitled English shows are comprehensible, and all of it might expand your mind.

Something better will probably come along. Till then, what we’ve got is still good.