TV Aficionados Dishing It Up

With her son off racing cars professionally in various cities and her hometown Cleveland Browns based 2,000 miles away, Mary Prappas of Los Angeles found it hard to satisfy her appetite for sports by watching just the 30-odd channels on her cable system.

So a few weeks ago, Prappas, 67, plunked down $3,200 for a television system that more of the nation’s video junkies are buying: a home satellite dish that can provide as many as 200 channels of viewing from around the world.

Across the country, poor service and the spiraling cost of cable-TV rates are sparking renewed interest in home satellite television systems among consumers such as Prappas. Satellite TV nearly disappeared in the mid-1980s after Home Box Office and other cable program services began scrambling their satellite feeds to thwart pirates.

With her new satellite dish, Prappas can often watch her son Ted, 34, compete live in American Racing Series events, instead of waiting for delayed broadcasts of the Indy-type race cars over the 24-hour sports cable network ESPN. Likewise, she will be able to see most of the Browns’ games when football season starts this fall. Prappas is so happy with her purchase that she may cancel her cable-TV service, which she complains often goes on the blink “for hours at a time.”

“I gotta tell you,” she said, “the picture that comes off the satellite is crystal-clear. I can see all sorts of stuff. I’ve picked up golf game feeds with no commercials in it, and the other day I watched a Perry Como show that wasn’t broadcast” in Los Angeles until three days later.

The system of satellites that orbit the Earth 23,000 miles above the Equator was originally established to transmit programming from broadcast networks and cable-programming services to local TV stations and cable-system operators. But the development of relatively inexpensive dish antennas allowed consumers to pick up the satellite signals themselves.

While 3 million dish owners pale in comparison to cable television’s 52 million viewers, the satellite-TV industry is losing its outlaw reputation at a time that cable is under siege. Earlier this month--in response to consumer protests about the cable industry--a House subcommittee approved a bill designed to control prices for basic cable TV, for instance.

The satellite-TV industry has also been helped by technological improvements that make it easier to tune in signals and have helped shrink an earlier generation of 12-foot to 16-foot dishes to more manageable sizes. Despite the advances, satellite TV could be eclipsed in a few years by direct-broadcast satellite technology, which uses a satellite receiving dish just 18 inches in diameter, experts say.

Yet satellite TV, once mostly a fixture in rural back yards where cable service was limited, is increasingly finding its way into urban areas--despite attempts by many localities to regulate the placement or appearance of the big dishes. In the process, the technology has lost its reputation as a plaything for video outlaws intent on pirating pay-cable broadcasts.

General Instruments Corp., for instance, has begun to market satellite-TV systems through some Sears stores in the Midwest. The New York cable equipment manufacturer is also building a 2,500 square-foot satellite-TV store in San Diego to sell directly to consumers, said Michael Meltzer, a General Instruments vice president.

Meanwhile, the industry is drawing the attention of large Japanese consumer electronics companies, such as Panasonic, Uniden and Toshiba. All three have begun selling tuners that descramble the satellite signal for $750 to $2,500.

“I’ve seen satellite TV change from a real hobbyist enterprise to a consumer item” of wider appeal, said Henry Taylor Howard, vice chairman of the satellite-TV equipment company Chaparral Communications in San Jose and one of the early pioneers of satellite television. “It’s not just a high-tech item anymore.”

Today, there are 10 times as many dish owners as a decade ago, reports the Satellite Broadcasting & Communications Assn. of America in Washington. And new systems are being shipped to dealers at a rate of 1,000 units a day. Growth is so dramatic that even the $16 billion-a-year cable industry is beginning to take notice.

“They have emerged as pretty viable competitors,” National Cable Television Assn. spokesman John Wolfe said of the satellite industry.

Nowhere is satellite TV’s popularity more evident than in California, which leads the nation in the number of installations with 295,000. Experts say interest in the state is being fueled by new arrivals from overseas and around the country who, like Mary Prappas, often maintain their interest in hometown teams or in major overseas sports events, such as the World Cup soccer matches or the Tour de France bicycle race.

But satellite television is attracting more than just sports fans these days. In fact, the variety of movies, foreign television broadcasts, traditional cable network fare like MTV and even radio station broadcasts is so immense that viewers say it quickly alters ordinary viewing habits.

Satellite dish owner Scott McFarland, for example, was confounded when he received an Arbitron TV ratings book and was asked to list the television shows he watched.

“I filled it out satellite by satellite,” said McFarland, who is the owner of the Round Table Pizza chain. “I told them I was watching Johnny Carson at 8:30 p.m. and then Discovery Channel . . . the HBO East Coast feed, the HBO West Coast feed and a whole bunch of other stuff. I probably drove them crazy.” (Arbitron, in fact, has a policy for measuring satellite viewing: It credits viewing of most cable and broadcast shows but not network feeds, foreign broadcasts and other programming that can’t be tied to a domestic TV broadcast station.)

Although more than 100 channels are freely available for satellite viewing, satellite owners must now pay monthly subscription fees to receive unscrambled pictures of most popular cable shows, such as MTV, Showtime, Cable News Network and HBO. Although prices are as much as 30% cheaper than cable, that doesn’t include the $2,000 to $3,500 a consumer must also spend for satellite equipment and installation.

Besides an 8- to 12-foot dish, a viewer will need an integrated receiver-decoder that locks in and processes the satellite signal. He’ll also need special program guides.

Although a 1986 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission abolished highly restrictive satellite-dish zoning ordinances, Thousand Oaks is one of several hundred cities across the country that continue to regulate the placement of dishes.

“We are concerned with the aesthetic impact,” said Shawn Mason, assistant city attorney for Thousand Oaks. He said city law calls for a dish to “harmonize with background materials and colors and not be more than 20 feet above grade level.”

“There’s no question, it’s not cheap,” said Steven Ross, a satellite-dish owner who heads his own Los Angeles real estate consulting firm. “I’ve had cable, but it’s nothing like satellite TV. You can really get addicted.”