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.

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.

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.