Word: hbo
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...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 a monthly subscription fee. Showtime and the Movie Channel will begin similar scrambling on May 27, and most other satellite-beamed cable channels, including...
...folk hero in that struggle, though his identity remains a mystery. Ordinary home dishes are able only to receive signals, not to send them; thus experts think the pirate signal probably came from a TV station or other commercial facility. Wherever the stunt originated, TV executives were not amused. HBO has lodged a complaint with the FCC, threatened to prosecute the pirate and made technical adjustments that it claims will prevent any repeat attack. "He probably thinks this was just a prank," says HBO Vice President David Pritchard. "But the fact is someone has interfered with authorized satellite transmissions...
...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 ($12.95 for HBO, $10.95 for Showtime...
When an actor plays a real person, the subject is not always thrilled. On the day Yelena Bonner arrived in Italy for medical treatment last December, the HBO film Sakharov was on TV, and she watched. "I liked it so much that I cried in two places," said Bonner. Last week she sought out Jason Robards, who portrayed her dissident husband, to tell him how moved she had been. Bonner was in Washington to address the National Academy of Sciences, and she went over to the National Theater, where Robards was participating in the Helen Hayes Awards. The actor kissed...
...daring electronic whiz called Captain Midnight breaks into hbo programming to air dish owners' beefs against cable services...