The Final Frontier

Would Spock understand the need for a bowling alley music channel?

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://mytown.ca/zepp
11/25/07

My wife pointed out a ad in the Sac Bee that struck me as distinctly creepy today. “Launching on 10 NEW Satellite Platforms! Supreme Master Television goes GLOBAL!”

OK, I’m a little wary of self-styled “Supreme Masters” having unlimited broadcasting power. That always seems like a recipe for problems down the road. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast. I’m just saying that people should keep an eye on them, since these are the types to have a bad habit of trying to form their followers into armies for the lord and they go out and try to take over the world. Gawd knows we have enough problems like that with our garden-variety politicians without cult leaders chiming in.

So I looked into this “Supreme Master.” She is called “Supreme Master Ching Hai”, and is affectionately known to her followers as “SuMa” (an affectionate abbreviation of “Supreme Master”, and no, I’m not making that up). Her real name is Hue Dang Trinh, and she was originally a Vietnamese Roman Catholic who became a Buddhist. On the surface, at least, the group practices Quan Yin worship, (Quan Yin is also known as Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, Guanyin, and Miao Shan, among others). In a nutshell, it is the feminine in Buddhism, and is normally a quite benign form of religion. I poked Wikipedia for more information on this group, and as is often the case, found a lot of text that had clearly been written by acolytes of the group, and more text written by skeptics. The worst I could find was that some people thought she was a bit flamboyant in manner and dress for a Buddhist Monk, and compared her to Madonna (the pop star, and not the other female religious icon.)

In the end, I concluded that neither she nor her group were particularly sinister, and didn’t have the warning flags one associates with cults. Followers didn’t have to pay initiation fees or donate all their worldly possessions, there were no expensive steps up, they were encouraged to associate with others outside the group, and their finances appeared to be fairly transparent.

But it left me wondering who ELSE was availing themselves of ever more inexpensive satellite broadcasting power. I know of people who are making plans for broadcast over a satellite uplink which in effect would be their own television network channel. The broadcast technology has become VERY available in recent years.

So I went looking to see who was broadcasting. Obviously, there’s all the TV networks here and abroad, and a lot of countries have educational and religious stations piped through – many of them “in the clear,” which means anyone with a dish can access them.

There is a channel devoted to Iraqi music, and another devoted to Thai Army songs, which to my surprise wouldn’t sound out of place in an elevator in a posh New York hotel. There’s a Hungarian channel (plus an HBO Hungary), and TurkTV, which apparently is NOT a “Scrubs” marathon on the Comedy Channel.

Indeed, along with the networks and government channels, there’s a lot of those two exercises in human fantasizing, religion and porn.

MLMs are starting to move in. Herbalife apparently has a satellite transmitter now. So does the Global Shopping Network. Space: the final frontier. You can get it at 40%, or become a direct distributor and get it at wholesale.

I came across something called the “NPS Barker Channel” which filled me with a feeling of dull horror as visions of old game shows flitted through my mind, but was actually just the Naval Postgraduate School.

There is Rock 300, which promises “24 hour music service to bowling centres” I bet a lot of their material gets pirated for porn movies, too. Satellite Bingo Network broadcasts to bingo halls, and I’m sure you’re all going to log off right now and go looking for THAT one. I wonder if it’s elevator music, or someone calling out letters and numbers. Anyone brave enough or bold enough to check it out, please don’t call me. I really don’t want to know.

There’s the California Channel, which seems to be a sort of Cspan for California. However, the listings showed only four one-hour shows over the past three months, which suggests that at this date, it’s a tad underutilized. You would think they would at least show old Arnie movies on it to fill the air time.

There’s the Parliamentary Channel, which is a sort of Cspan for Britain, but when I browsed it, it was 404ed. That was a bit surprising, since Commons tends to be a lot more interesting than the American Congress. The Senate might remind you of a convention of librarians, whereas Parliament is more like a traffic jam in Djakarta. Only with eloquence.

The list was long, but far from complete. So I went to satellite-links.co.uk/ and looked over a list of providers of satellite services. The list is hundreds of names long, companies all over the world providing reasonably low-cost uplinks to anyone who wants one.

Of course, what’s really missing here is private-sector launch facilities. The free market, when it comes to space technology, is at about 1953 levels. If you want to get your own satellite into space, you need a government willing to schedule it in on their launch rotation. That’s mostly Russia and the US, but Japan, China, France, the UK and India are all becoming players.

The private sector still hasn’t achieved orbit, let alone put a satellite up. But the satellites going up have so much relay capacity that it’s possible that in another ten or fifteen years, we might all have our own personal uplink connections whereby we can transceive from anywhere on the earth’s surface to anywhere else on the earth’s surface.

When we reach the point where private individuals have control over a satellite and what is fed through it is when you’ll start seeing some really distinctive stuff being piped through, for good or worse.

And someday, we’ll have an outlaw satellite, with pirate material and gawd knows what else.

It’s going to be an interesting time.