Word: arietta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Arietta, New York, is the sort of town satellite-TV companies dream about. Located 70 miles northwest of Albany, in the midst of the Adirondack Mountains, the tiny community (pop. 301) has no traffic lights and no full- time doctor. Many telephones are still on party lines, and the nearest , supermarket is 50 miles away. Television too has largely bypassed the town. Arietta is too remote and unprofitable to be wired for cable, and a good antenna brings in only two or, at most, three stations. Between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. during the summer, because of solar interference, even...
...past month, however, Arietta has plunged fast and deep into the multichannel universe. Primestar, a home-satellite company, picked Arietta as a demonstration site for its 77-channel DBS service. The company offered residents free installation of a 36-in. receiving dish and two months of free service. Ninety of the town's 133 families signed up, and in one weekend Arietta went from snowy images of Murder, She Wrote to a crystal-clear cornucopia of everything from cnn and the Cartoon Network to round-the-clock movies...
...failed in the view of at least a few residents. Donald Courtney, 67, a retired forest ranger, is one local who refused Primestar. "I can fall asleep in front of one channel as well as I can with a dozen," he says. Nevertheless, TV has made its mark on Arietta. Video rentals at Farber's General Store have dropped. Twelve-year-old Dean Hotaling isn't playing as much basketball as he used to. ("I watch about three hours a day now. I used to watch one hour.") And the barrage of TV news has quickly turned local viewers into...