207 Channels
Wanting to share the
American experience, I have just acquired a TV satellite dish. I am now
prepared to report on my venture into this brave new world that has so many
channels.
You have
probably seen ads telling of the marvels we can bring into our homes by
acquiring a dish free or, in the ad to which I responded, for $100. (All prices
in this world end in 95 cents, so this price was actually $99.95, but for
convenience I am going to round everything off.) You and I were not born
yesterday, and we know that no one is going to give us such a valuable and
sophisticated product so cheaply. We have read the fine print and know that we
get the dish at such a low price only if we subscribe to the service providing
the content for one year at $30 a month. Moreover, since this is a new and
mysterious gadget, it is prudent to get a three-year repair service contract
costing $120, and the thing needs to be delivered, which is another $30. And so
far we haven't counted the cost of installation. That is "basically" $200, but
in my special case, for reasons that may not be so special, the installation
cost was $350. Not surprisingly, everything is not going to work just right the
first time, and though you are well covered by warranties you are going to
spend many hours on the telephone while "our entertainment providers are
serving other customers." Valuing my time at the minimum wage, I calculate my
investment of hours in getting started at $100. So I now have a fixed cost,
excluding the cost of content, of $700.
In order to get started I had to sign up for a package of
content costing $30 a month. That, however, was a minimum package, and there
were many other more expensive options. In fact, to get fairly representative
coverage, but with little sports coverage, I soon found myself up to about $80
a month. Amortizing my fixed costs over 36 months, the whole thing was coming
to about $100 a month. Is that a lot or a little? About 5 million families now
think the satellite dish is worthwhile, and the number is growing. A larger
number are paying nearly that much a month for cable, with fewer channels than
are available on satellite. There are great economies of scale. For a household
of five people, $100 a month is $20 per capita.
What do we
get for this? That is hard to tell. The system provides minimum guidance to
what can be seen. One can scroll through a guide on the screen that tells what
is showing on each channel, but the information given is minimal. The names of
movies are shown, but not what they are about, who is in them, when they were
produced, or any indication of their quality such as one would get in a
newspaper listing. One click on the name of any currently running movie will
bring it up on the screen, but without any additional information except for
its rating (G, PG, etc.). Unless one is exceedingly well informed about movies,
or quite indifferent, one can surf around for quite a while and only reach a
movie one wants to watch after it has already begun. These problems can be
somewhat eased by a subscription to the special satellite edition of TV
Guide , but that is also an enormous maze of options.
After long and tedious research I am able to
report on the content of the 207 channels available with the packages I have,
or at least what was available during prime time in one evening.
Ninety-nine of these
channels provided no content to subscribers. That included 28 blank channels,
25 channels containing advertising for the system or schedules of coming
events, eight channels of broadcast stations generally available free without a
satellite dish but requiring payment with the satellite dish, and seven
channels duplicating what was being shown on other channels. Also there were 31
channels airing music without any picture. These channels were very finely
classified--1970s hits, 1980s hits, several varieties of rock, several
varieties of country, and so on. I consider that to be essentially similar to
what can be obtained on the radio in most places.
Of the
remaining 108 channels that had some content, 56 were showing movies, 45 for
free, and 11 for pay. The fee for the pay movies was low, $3 if your satellite
dish was connected to your phone line; otherwise $8. A quick scroll through the
movies suggests that their quality is about what you would find in your local
theaters on any given day--many awful, some fair, and a few good. That is no
surprise, because almost all the movies have been in your local theater. The
pay movies were no better than the free movies, only somewhat newer. A person
who wants to stay home to see a movie on any night, or even on every night,
should find something amusing. For oldies like me the most intriguing channel
is Turner Classic Movies. One morning I came across a 1927 movie called
Love , with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. It was really Anna
Karenina ! But even I don't want to watch those old movies for more than a
few minutes.
The 16 channels devoted to sports, three of them for pay,
were a surprise to me. I hadn't expected so much space to be devoted to rugby
(two channels), fishing, beach volleyball, stock-car racing, and ballooning,
but I suppose there are those who love these activities. More access to
standard events is available in deluxe packages beyond what I paid for.
Eleven
news channels all have pretty much the same news. I generously classify nine
channels as "education," including two channels of C-SPAN, the Discovery
Channel, a health channel, and a few others. Then there is a smattering of
other things--shopping, food, housekeeping, cartoons, religion, and so on. One,
Comedy Central, carries a new program, Win Ben Stein's Money , for which
I confess a special interest. One channel described in the brochure as
"tasteful adult programming for mature audiences" I can vouch for as being very
clean. All the girls look as if they just stepped out of the shower.
The technology of satellite TV--one 18-inch
dish on the deck of my apartment receiving 207 channels from something flying
in space thousands of miles away--is wonderful. The programming is less
wonderful. But still, I can't complain about what is there. I do, however,
wonder about what is not there. When there are so many channels available, why
is so little space devoted to education and art? My own little corner of the
world, policy wonking, is an example. Washington think tanks long to get their
programs on C-SPAN, but C-SPAN has space for only a few of them. Another
channel devoted to such talk could well interest as many people as want to see
a 1928 movie starring Conrad Nagel, and would not hurt them. And that only
scratches the surface of possible educational programming. On the arts side,
there are videotapes of great performances of great operas. Could they take the
place of one of the 56 channels of movies? I recently acquired a wonderful
videotape of ballet with Suzanne Farrell and Baryshnikov (produced,
incidentally, with support from the much-maligned National Endowment for the
Arts). I can imagine a channel devoted to such productions. My economist
friends will certainly tell me that if such programming would pay off it would
be done. But there is more to life than economics.
These
last musings raise in my mind another question, a long way from the cute
18-inch dish on my deck. Many estimable people are devoting themselves to
ridding our popular culture of obscenity, sex, and violence. Who is devoting
himself to enriching our popular culture with high art?
POSTSCRIPT: Two more weeks with my cute TV satellite dish have increased
my appreciation of it. I have learned to find my way around better, although
that is still a problem and I think that a technology that can deliver so much
information should be able to provide better guidance on the screen and not
require reference to a printed magazine. I have found that when the incoming
music is routed through my stereo, I get excellent sound. Just accidentally,
while surfing and without any prior notice, I came upon a broadcast of Don
Giovanni that was very good. I assume that the whole thing was being
broadcast, although I came in at the beginning of the last act. There were no
pictures. And I have finally sat through a whole movie. It was a 1937 version
of The Prisoner of Zenda , with Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.,
Raymond Massey, David Niven, Madeleine Carroll, and Mary Astor. They don't make
casts like that any more. I remain of the opinion, however, that the content is
far short of the potentialities of the technology.
