Word: dishing
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...mysterious dispatch, seen for several minutes in the East and Midwest , by hundreds of thousands of subscribers to the pay-cable service, was clearly intended as a rallying cry for the more than 1.5 million owners of home satellite dishes in the U.S. These video free-lancers are angry because many of the TV signals they have been plucking from the sky are one by one turning into a jumble. In January, HBO and Cinemax (both owned by Time Inc.) became the first two cable services to scramble their signals, thus preventing dish owners from watching them without paying...
...Most dish owners, however, are less interested in disrupting other people's TV signals than in ending the disruption of their own. When home receiving dishes first became available in 1979, they were a boon for rural residents who lived outside the range of cable hookups. With a dish-shaped antenna aimed at one of several communications satellites circling the globe, these viewers could watch not just satellite-beamed entertainment channels (which cable systems pick up with their own dishes and distribute to subscribers via cables), but foreign broadcasts, corporate video conferences, even the private transmissions of network programs like...
...size and cost of home dishes dropped (from more than $10,000 just a few years ago to about $2,500 for many current models), the devices began to appear in urban and suburban areas, where more and more viewers are opting for dishes instead of cable. To retain control of their channels, the programmers turned to scrambling, in which the picture is electronically inverted and blurred. To unscramble it, a dish owner must buy a $395 decoder and, in the case of "premium" cable services, pay an extra monthly fee similar to that paid by cable subscribers...
Fears that available programming will soon disappear have sent the home satellite business into a nose dive. Sales of dishes, tooling along at about 70,000 a month last autumn, fell to fewer than 15,000 in January. Bert LeCroy, owner of Sky Search Video in the Atlanta suburbs, estimates that ten dish dealers in the area have closed their doors in just the past two weeks. Many consumers are upset that the costly dishes they bought in pursuit of video independence may turn out to be duds. Says Vincent Morgan, 41, who has a dish in the backyard...
...religious person. Neither am I anti-religious. I am uncertain and concerned about a personal resolution that could change me. But organized, deceptive religion is alienating, even when it's a satellite-dish away. Face to face manipulation only builds walls of bias no Word can reach through...