SIGHTING A SHIFT IN THE CENTERS OF ATTRACTION : Satellite Dishes Are Offering Appetizing Entertainment Fare

Dave’s dish.

“Come on over,” my friend, Dave, said on the phone. “I bought myself a dish.”

Dave had become a do-it-yourself TV mogul by joining the nation’s 1.5 million owners of satellite dishes. For $3,000 (about middle-range cost), he purchased a 10-foot metal dish that resembles a giant bird bath or wok. The dish was mounted on the roof of Dave’s apartment building and aimed at the southern sky from which it collected and then amplified satellite microwave signals. A cable delivered each signal to an indoor converter enabling it to be received on Dave’s ordinary TV set. A remote control device allowed him to direct the dish from one satellite to another.

With one lurching step, Dave had caught up with the communications future. He now had more than 100 TV stations at his command. He could eavesdrop on the world.

I found Dave in front of his set holding a remote controller in his right hand like one of the “phasers” that Capt. Kirk and his crew used on “Star Trek.”

Dave thrust the device forward and said, “Let’s take a quick trip through the skies.” And we were off.

Even though Dave lives in an area of the San Fernando Valley not wired for cable, his satellite dish can pull in distant signals and distant realms, from the larger, more famous cable services like ESPN and CNN to the relatively obscure Home Shopping Network, National Jewish Television, National Christian Network and soft-core-porn-oriented American Extasy.

Dave receives ABC, NBC and CBS feeds before ordinary viewers do. For example, he doesn’t have to stay up until 12:30 a.m. to watch David Letterman with the West Coast’s underprivileged dishless viewers. He watches the show when it’s fed by NBC at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time for airing three hours later.

He also sees TV sometimes raw and unguarded. He’s seen Dan Rather in his shirt sleeves, tie loosened, rehearsing his script in front of the camera before “The CBS Evening News.” He’s eavesdropped on CBS Sports star Brent Musburger blowing up at a producer.

A sports addict, Dave is now the superfan of his fantasies, gorging himself on a fat smorgasbord of satellite feeds that beam remote and sometimes obscure sports events to his home. “I just love curling from Canada,” he said. Curling?

On a typical Sunday morning, Dave can choose from two dozen satellite sports events. We began watching a fight on ABC. What made it special was that this network feed had no commercials. We chuckled when the announcer wondered aloud why one of the fighters wasn’t using his left hand. During an earlier station break, while the rest of the nation was watching a commercial, ABC left the mike on in the fighter’s corner where we heard him tell his handlers that he had broken his hand.

With his dish, Dave can also pull in Rams, Dodgers, Lakers or other local teams whose national home-game telecasts are blacked out in the Los Angeles area. Dave and his fellow superfans and satellite dish-equipped bars that cater to sports crowds are lucky because blackouts don’t affect satellite dishes.

But scrambling does. Scrambling is the magic word that makes Dave and his fellow dish owners wince.

CBS has already announced plans to foil them by scrambling its satellite signal, but the real shake-up is coming in the cable industry.

Dish owners have had the capacity to snatch out of the air for free what regular cable subscribers have to pay for. That is no longer the case with pay cable Home Box Office, however, which began scrambling Jan. 15. Showtime/The Movie Channel is expected to follow shortly, and such other basic cable services as ESPN, CNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, USA and the Disney Channel, among others, are committed to doing the same.

To receive scrambled satellite transmissions, a dish owner must buy a $395 decoder in addition to paying the basic monthly fee required by the service.

The satellite dish industry got a boost recently when the deregulation-minded Federal Communications Commission restricted local governments from prohibiting installation of satellite dishes. The industry grew jittery, however, during recent hearings on scrambling held by the House telecommunications subcommittee.

Publicity about scrambling has slowed once-booming dish sales to a relative trickle. “Sales for January and February were off 50%,” said Joe Boyle, vice president of communications for SPACE, the Satellite Television Industry Assn. “There’s a lot of confusion.”

Meanwhile, there’s also talk that major-league baseball--whose teams televise about 1,800 road games annually--may become the first sport to scramble signals of all games beamed back to a visiting team’s market. And if scrambling works for baseball, won’t the other sports be sure to follow?

Dave is concerned. “Maybe if CBS learns that people like me are hearing Brent Musburger blow up on the air and things like that, they’ll scramble right away,” he said.

Not everything would be scrambled, though. I left Dave in front of the TV set, his right thumb poised to change channels. On the screen was a Raisin Bran commercial being beamed from Canada.

In French.