HE’S BEAMING

I’d like to mention a glaring oversight in Daniel Howard Cerone’s otherwise excellent piece on DirecTV (“This Couch Potato Blasts Into Space,” Jan. 8).

Since I helped create the monster by writing the first-ever commercial television program in Hollywood in 1947, when Paramount’s experimental W6XAO became KTLA, I have felt morally responsible for everything that has happened in television since, a mighty burden that sometimes keeps me awake nights when I could be watching Rush Limbaugh reruns.

My experience with TV programming began with a 10-inch RCA receiver in the days when the major entertainment on the tube consisted of KTLA’s test pattern. Some claim TV has gone steadily downhill since, but I disagree. There is much worthwhile, and with the new DSS system, as Cerone notes, it is delivered with superb picture and CD-quality sound, which Cerone found sadly lacking in the “annoying imperfections” of his cable-TV delivery.

I have been viewing cable programming for the last six years on a six-foot front-projection screen, with a 200-watt stereo amplifier, and usually the imperfections I detect are my own fault: ancient cabling, poor connectors, etc. The DSS pictures I have seen are only minimally better.

But Cerone has overlooked something more important: standard satellite transmission, to a full-size dish. At the moment, 27 satellites are available to me, a minimum of 24 channels each, which adds up to 648, and with compression the number can increase tenfold. I receive all the networks, in every time zone , every football game--if I wish to pay--and even his beloved MTV, not to mention my beloved KTLA. And much of the programming is free.

The picture is the ultimate: 425 lines of resolution, exactly the same as DSS, state of the art until high-definition TV comes along--any minute now.

But I can’t get the Raiders’ home games either--thank God.

MELVILLE SHAVELSON

Santa Monica