Little Dish Could Force Cable Into Unconventional Changes

A cable television convention being held in Anaheim this week has been called the Western Cable Show for 27 years. But as convention chairman Robert McRann noted, that’s a misnomer.

The convention, which drew a record 18,000 attendees from 30 countries, is more like “an international telecommunications show,” McRann said.

One of the hot topics has been something most cable operators would probably just as soon not hear about--the new 18-inch DirecTV-RCA satellite dish that hit Los Angeles outlets in October.

Finally, there is competition for cable. Slipshod companies will have to get their acts together and upgrade their systems or face a mass exodus.

There is now a relatively inexpensive alternative to cable.

For $700 plus $200 or so for installation--more for a deluxe model and/or a second receiver--you can get a DirecTV-RCA compact dish system, and a whole new 150-channel world of television opens.

A big plus is that the small dish can be mounted out of sight on your roof or behind a bush in your back yard.

And the system is incredible.

It is the first to use digital compression, so the picture is clearer than what you get on cable. And the sound is better, too.

For another $149, you can get the NFL Sunday Ticket for the rest of this season and all of next season. Every game is available except blacked out Ram or Raider home games.

This week, the NBA announced a satellite-dish package of more than 400 games. It, too, sells for $149 and is available to DirecTV subscribers.

DirecTV also offers eight Prime regional sports networks, among them Prime Ticket, for $7.95 a month.

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Program suppliers really don’t care how viewers get their programs, as long as they get them. They do business with cable operators and they do business with dish distributors.

Ed Frazier is the president of Liberty Sports, the sports arm of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) that now owns Prime Ticket, and his company is one of the major suppliers of sports programming in the world.

“DirecTV is the first out of the box, and that counts for a lot,” he said. “But cable technology will be upgraded and in two or three years it will leapfrog over the current satellite-dish technology.

“Where DirecTV now offers 150 channels, cable in the future will offer 500.”

Counters DirecTV spokesman Tom Bracken: “We will be upgrading our system, right along with everything else.”

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With the arrival of the 18-inch dish, will the old C-Band eight-foot or 10-foot dish systems become dinosaurs?

Hardly.

Frazier and Glenn Gurgiolo, the president of Liberty Satellite Sports, the nation’s largest supplier of satellite dish programming, say interest in the DirecTV system has kindled interest in all satellite-dish technology.

DirecTV and RCA launched in five small test markets in June. Now RCA is manufacturing 100,000 of the 18-inch dishes a month and can’t keep up with demand.

PrimeStar, which provides the hardware as part of a $38.95 basic subscription price, is doing business at about 30,000 units a month.

And Gurgiolo said the old C-Band systems are selling at double what was anticipated, averaging about 60,000 a month.

Said DirecTV’s Bracken: “We knew our push would create awareness in satellite dish technology and help everyone.”

Why would people still want the old cumbersome C-Band units?

“It’s because of what they offer,” Frazier said. “You get 500 channels and news feeds and all kinds of things from all over the world.”

Said Gurgiolo: “A lot of people like to peek in and watch raw feeds. You never know what you’ll find.”

TV-Radio Notes

Two new sports channels that were drawing attention at the cable convention were the Golf Channel and the Classic Sports Network. All systems are go for the 24-hour Golf Channel to launch on Jan. 17, says Joe Gibbs, the Orlando-based channel’s president and its co-founder with Arnold Palmer. No, Gibbs is not the former Washington Redskin coach. He is a cable mogul from Alabama who has raised $80 million to start the channel.

The Golf Channel will offer two tournaments a week, a domestic tournament from the PGA, Senior PGA, Nike or LPGA tours, and a European tournament. The rest of the time will be filled with instructional programming, news and information programming, talk shows and such, and much of that programming will be repeated. The suggested subscription price is $6.95 a month. The channel will be available in about 30 million cable homes and also in DirecTV homes. There are now about 200,000 DirecTV homes, and that number is growing at a rate of about 3,000 a day.

The Classic Sports Network, which had one of the largest and most elaborate booths on the Convention Center floor, is scheduled to launch March 24. Running it are Steve Greenberg, a former deputy commissioner of baseball and a former law partner of Alan Rothenberg, and Brian Bedol, former senior vice president of Time-Warner Enterprises. They have compiled a library of classic events and shows that should make this channel a big hit with sports fans.

ESPN’s “GameDay” Sunday will have a powerful interview Jim Rome did with Stanley Wilson, the former Cincinnati Bengal, Oklahoma and Banning High star who was suspended by the NFL for getting zonked out on cocaine the night before the 1989 Super Bowl. Wilson hasn’t done an interview since Penthouse paid him $200,000 for one in 1990. Rome landed the interview because of the persistence of producer Mark Shapiro, who tracked down Wilson at a medium-security prison in Bakersfield in early November. Wilson was there finishing a three-year sentence for burglary. Rome taped the interview with Wilson two weeks ago. “He’s really a sweet guy,” Rome said. “We’re pulling for him.” The interview will also be shown on Sunday night’s “SportsCenter.”

Saturday’s John Wooden Classic will be on NBC, with Tom Hammond, Steve Jones, Matt Guokas and sideline reporter Paul Sunderland working the doubleheader that begins at 10 a.m. Radio coverage of both games will be on XTRA. Randy Rosenbloom, Warren Williamson and host Geoff Nathanson will announce the Massachusetts-Kansas game. Regular UCLA announcers Chris Roberts and Marques Johnson will work the UCLA-Kentucky game.

Channel 9 will carry three companion fights to Saturday night’s Riddick Bowe-Larry Donald HBO fight at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The Channel 9 card will follow the main event. HBO’s coverage begins at 6:30 p.m. . . . ESPN will carry a college football awards show Thursday at 6:30 p.m.

Because XTRA’s transmitter is in Tijuana, the station has a Mexican broadcasting license. So the station had to interrupt the Loose Cannons on Thursday morning to carry a Mexican national broadcast of a news conference held by new President Ernesto Zedillo. . . . For the record: The Jim Healy tribute, repeated on KMPC last Saturday, first ran on Aug. 24. Healy died of liver cancer on July 22. . . . KMPC is still selling cassettes of the Healy tribute for $12, with proceeds going to the American Cancer Society. More than 1,500 tapes have been sold. Details: (310) 840-4943. . . . Brian Golden, KMPC part-time sports talk-show host, will do the play-by-play for the KBET radio broadcast of Saturday night’s Quartz Hill-Hart high school playoff football game.