Don’t mess with ‘Sewing With Nancy.’ : Scrambling Doesn’t Faze 2 Dish Owners

Some of the nation’s 1.3 million satellite dish owners may have flinched in pain Wednesday night when they aimed their dishes at SATCOM 3 or GALAXY 1 and found only wobbly lines where “The Shining” or “Starman” were supposed to be.

But the decision of two of the best-known movie channels, HBO and Cinemax, to begin scrambling their satellite signals Wednesday didn’t mean a ball of yarn to the L. L. Longs of Canoga Park.

Just don’t mess with “Sewing With Nancy.”

L. L. doesn’t spend a lot of time with Nancy himself. But the program is his wife Betty’s favorite, along with “Weekend Gardening.”

Discontinued Service

The Longs said they had discontinued their cable television service and installed a 12-foot-wide wire mesh satellite dish on their roof when, without warning, Valley Cable Co. cut off SPN, the channel that carried the two shows.

There were other provocations, too.

“Once, in the middle of a baseball game, I lost Channel 11 and I had to rig up my old antenna right in the middle of a Dodger game,” said Long, a retired telephone company instructor. “Then you call up and some girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about says it’s the telephone company’s fault.”

So the Longs joined the growing number of people who decided, in the words of one satellite dish promoter’s brochure, to “get one up on the world.”

But they don’t really fit the image of the satellite pirate, who will make the initial investment of up to $4,000 to gain free access to everything from the latest movies to the world of sports.

Willing to Pay

They said their motives for buying the private reception stations are not so much to pirate subscription services as to get shows that they could not see any other way.

The Longs said they think it is fair for a private broadcast company to get paid for its service and would be willing to pay if they watched the programs.

But most of the satellite programming they watch is available somewhere free, they said.

Recently released movies, available for a fee from cable companies but free over the airwaves, had little to do with their decision to install the dish on their roof, the Longs said.

Those channels show only new movies, L. L. Long complained.

“In my opinion, they haven’t made any good movies since the good guys stopped winning,” he said.

Dropped Showtime

He said they wasted their money on Showtime, one of the movie channels, before they dropped the cable company.

“We paid $12 to $15 a month for Showtime and I don’t think we watched it once a month,” Long said.

Long acknowledges that he may have used the satellite dish to cheat a little. He does occasionally tune in a blacked-out football game or baseball game, for example.

But mostly, he and his wife enjoy searching the airwaves for out-of-town stations that show nice old movies, like the ones Jimmy Stewart made, Long said.

They also like the reruns on WGN in Chicago.

“I like ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ and ‘Barney Miller,’ Long said.

And they watch “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” on Channel 11 in Dallas.

Betty Long said she has also found four public broadcasting stations around the country that broadcast lots of crafts programs she likes to watch.

Network Shows a Favorite

And one of their big pleasures, they said, is watching the late-night network programs at an early hour. “We go to bed early,” Long said.

Their blissful television world may not be as secure as they believe, however.

HBO and Cinemax are just the first companies to try scrambling. Two of the major networks are among the dozen or so broadcasters reportedly considering the use of scrambling this year to protect their signals.

If that happened, the Longs would lose their early-night network shows and that occasional blacked-out game also.

Another company considering the move is SPN. If the Longs lose that, there will be no more “Sewing With Nancy.”

No problem.

“We’d just have to see what we could do about buying their service,” Long said.