Flight of the Digital Dish

摘要

By all accounts, John Baker, A 44-year-old venture capitalist, is a pretty smart guy. So more than a few of his New York friends took notice when he threw down close to $1,000 for a new satellite TV system a couple of months ago. They, too, were attracted by the decidedly late-20th-century look of RCA's Digital Satellite System, or DSS: sleek and ergonomic, from its shallow, punch-bowl-size dish-antenna to its slim-lined receiver-decoder, black. The Trekkie tricorder-shaped remote controller didn't hurt its baby-boomer appeal, either. But what really sold Baker, his friends and, apparently, hundreds of thousands of others is what DSS delivers: loads more television programming than cable—in sharp, dazzling digital perfection. Well, pretty darn close to laserdisc-quality pictures and compact-disc-clear sound. Compared with the big, bulky satellite dishes that make homes look like missile sites, DDS is cheaper to buy, and much easier to install. In less than an hour after he got his system to his Long Island home, Baker's wide-screen TV was awash in offerings, like a TV Guide run amok. "It's great; I must have 40 different movies," he says. "It beats the video store." And it is so simple to use, Baker says, that his 8-year-old son navigates its "point and select" choices with a technophile's unfettered ease. One of Baker's cousins, who recently put the small dish on the terrace of her 24th-story apartment in downtown Manhattan, raves: "It is wonderful and everybody who sees it thinks it's really cool."