re: #163 Barefoot Grin

I have vague memories of German soccer games airing on our PBS station late in the evening. It was strictly one top-of-the-arena camera panning back and forth. It didn’t really encourage enthusiasm for the game—it looked a bit like Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Football.”

Along about the time of the first gulf war we had one of those big c-band satellite dishes and a receiver that could steer it towards the various satellites. We would often see raw video, sometimes with ambient audio, sometimes without, often with voice commentary. The satellites covered an arc through the sky from east to west. The thing was a pain in the ass to keep aligned. The actuator arm would last a while and then crap out. You could buy commercial packages to unscramble the various premium feeds, like HBO. When the little, fixed systems came out we we with those and never looked back.