CABLE COMPANIES FINALLY appear to be "getting it."
They're sluggishly rolling out the fiber-optic line upgrades they'd been promising for most of the decade.
(Here in Seattle, the now-AT&T-owned TCI is finally getting around to some of the neighborhoods it promised upgraded service to by one to five years ago.)
So, now that you can finally get Comedy Central and maybe even TV Land on your cable system, what use is there for those cable-killers, the home satellite dishes?
Well, there are several reasons to consider the little dish instead of the long wire, even though the dish costs you up-front plus monthly programming fees at least comparable to those charged by cable. Among them:
You live where there's still no upgraded cable. South Park might be getting passe, but there's still Strangers With Candy to make a Comedy Central-less cable hookup a little less valuable each day. Not to mention the Food Network, the Game Show Network, BBC America, MuchMusic, etc. etc.
You live where there's no cable. The cable companies may have finally gotten around to certain "inner city" neighborhoods they'd previously shunned, but there are still some industrial, art-loft, rural, and isolated-town environments without the black coaxial running in.
You want lotsa extra-price movies and/or sports. If you're a hockey fanatic or if you're a fan of teams shown principally on some other region's Fox Sports variation or if you really, really want five different HBOs, the satellite's the only way to go.
You want porn. Some satellite dish companies offer channels displaying uncensored human-mating spectacles, or at least channels offering more lightly censored human-mating acts than the Spice channel or Skinemax offer.
You want certain channels even upgraded cable in your town doesn't offer. Different dish services offer various ethnic and foreign-language channels for folks from China, Brazil, India, etc. And there are some "mainstream" but third-string cable channels that now have only spotty pickups on local cable systems: BET On Jazz, Style, Discovery People, MTV'S M2, ESPN Classic, CNNfn, the Golf Network, Outdoor Life, MSNBC, Bloomberg Business News.
You want ZDTV. From the Softbank/Ziff-Davis computer-magazine empire, 24 hours (actually, more like six hours repeated four times) of talk shows and news-magazine shows about hi-tech, PC buying, and life on the ol' Internet. The Internet Tonight show's particularly valuable as a televisual "Weblog."
Unfortunately, its site only offers streaming live video during special events (speeches by tech-biz leaders, mostly); the short clips on its site only make you want to get a dish so you can see the whole thing.
Which, of course, is probably the management's goal.
Cable, however, still will have certain things satellite services don't. Local channels and major-network affiliates. Regional news channels such as NorthWest Cable News. And, of course, public access.
IN OTHER NEWS: Was a little amused by the headline, "Energetic Beck hasn't lost a beat with time." I thought to myself, "Sure he hasn't had anything close to a hit since '96, but Beck's not that old." Then, alas, the story turned out to be about Jeff Beck....
TOMORROW: What kids don't know that grownups assume is ubiquitous; and vice versa.
PITCH IN: This time, I'm looking for cultural artifacts today's young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
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