I received my official letter today.

[jashobeam]

I live in a very rural area, and we have cable & broadband. Where my mother grew up the houses are about 3 miles apart in some cases with no paved road access, only dirt paths winding through the forests in those mountains. The county plus another are getting together a committee to put broadband in. So, homes that before had no indoor bathroom most likely will have the option of broadband in the near future. How's that for rural access to broadband.

[andrews777]

Everyone was (is?) paying a "rural access fee," or something like that, which helped pay for running phone lines to rural locations.

BTW, the same arguments that the houses were too far apart to wire applies to phone and electricity. They are still far apart and they are likely to be at the end of the chain, but stuff does get connected over time. Things that are impossible seem to happen.

Of course living remotely makes it a bit more of a challenge. It is also not the best target if you are going for the largest number of people, but they can be targeted for completeness.

Brad

[jashobeam]

Everyone was (is?) paying a "rural access fee," or something like that, which helped pay for running phone lines to rural locations.

BTW, the same arguments that the houses were too far apart to wire applies to phone and electricity. They are still far apart and they are likely to be at the end of the chain, but stuff does get connected over time. Things that are impossible seem to happen.

Of course living remotely makes it a bit more of a challenge. It is also not the best target if you are going for the largest number of people, but they can be targeted for completeness.

Brad

In some cases counties raise money from local businesses to put in cable. They make sure to raise enough to cover the entire county rather than leaving the rural areas unreached. This covers the completeness you are speaking of.

[Claude Greiner]

The real problem I see with Sky Angel is that there aren't enough Christian people willing to pay a premium for Christian content. It simply comes down to convictions. Seems to be a problem with the church today in general. The general consensus was something like this...sure, Sky Angel sounds good, but don't expect me to give up my other 200 secular channels for it and be good and well sure that I'm not going to pay a dollar MORE for it. Perhaps this is what Mr. Johnson failed to anticipate. When it comes down to it, too many people are content to keep paying their monthly cable tithe no matter what or whom it supports.

Sky Angel was great for my family and I considered the decision to subscribe one of the best I have made. I live in a rural area and there is no way I can get the bandwidth to make the IPTV work. Not sure what I'm going to do now...

You hit it right the head on the nail right there!

As a DISH Network Retailer I can tell you first hand that it was very hard to get Sky Angel customers to pay for anything above and beyond the bare minimum.

We would literally fight with the customers because they had to buy the equipment out right for a few hundred dollars, then there was always the issue of trying to get them to upgrade to AT100 so they can get the equipment for FREE!

Don't get me wrong, the customers who bought the service where some of the nicest people I have ever met, but they did not like paying any bills to watch television!

I think the thing that really enforced this fact was when the Secular channels went away last year. There was very few people willing to pay even $5 to be able to continue to watch them!

[MellowYBird]

After receiving my letter I knew it was "official". I'll miss Sky Angel broadcasting, but our internet is just too unreliable for watching tv. Not to mention we have two DISH's one at 61.5 and the other at the 110/119.
I don't mind paying as much (even more) as anyone else, it's just I don't like paying for content that is not Christ centered or so called "family-friendly". I refuse to pay to hear or see men having "erection" issues or women that cannot fit into their "too small" clothing revealing more than I care to see, and that's what was and is shown even on DISHfamily package channels. They could easily show this content in all the other programming packages, but they have to ruin the ONLY small family package that is available.
I looked at the "Everything" pack and there are a total of only 4 "religious" channels available on DISH network and that is including Angel One.
It would be really nice if DISH network would come up with some sort of a Christian package but that would be hard having only 3 or 4 channels.

~MYB~

[Scroll]

Claude I think in part that's because because of what was being offered. Why pay $5 when for $20 you could have Dish Family, which is itself a more or less a recent advent.

I used to subscribe to Encore ($5) and Starz off & on (about the only commercial free movie channels with any family friendly movies to speak of) the and locals (used to have the distant independents until the WB/ UPN change), but when Dish added the access fee for not having a Dish pak I said forget all of it. Not that they were getting rich off of my few extra programming choices I guess.

Others find even less to view, even from the Family pak. So I'm not really surprised that some homes pretty much wanted only the SA channels. There are some homes that wouldn't even have a TV save for local news and religious programming, and this is a segment of viewership where you would be more likely to find such folks.

I know of one large Baptist church that in the 1970s that discouraged it's members from even owning a TV at all!

So yes, I can see where as a retailer you had some problems with customers. OTOH, it's not like they did a lot to make adding their programming more attractive. How long did it take them to even see the need for the a family pak tier?

[kevinbct]

I know of one large Baptist church that in the 1970s that discouraged it's members from even owning a TV at all!

Was it Independent Fundamental or Southern Baptist?

[jegrant]

I'll say this - I bought my system from Claude many years ago, and he explained how it was a better deal to take advantage of the E* subsidized hardware, and with a very minimal commitment to (at the time) AT40, I was able to get all the hardware I needed for SA* + E*.

So even for those who wanted SA* only, if they were willing to work with the dealer, and it was a good dealer, there were other options besides buying equipment outright.

[jashobeam]

C

I know of one large Baptist church that in the 1970s that discouraged it's members from even owning a TV at all!

There are some that still exist like that. There are also some Baptist and other denomination churches that won't allow any taped music in their service. Our former preacher said he and his music team traveled to one church and were not allowed in because they had taped music, women singers in pants and different skin colors among the group. The pastor took his group and went home. Our current church has no official stand on TV ownership, but some members have not owned a TV in over 20 years. In college we were not allowed to go to movies with a higher than PG rating, and the classes before us were not allowed to go to movies at all. Before I graduated they had their own theater and ran regular movies on campus.

[dahenny]

As long as we are off on a tangent, 100 years ago it was a sin to chew gum, or to go to a baseball game. The official statement from my former denomination was that "movie houses" are off limits. They have since revised.

Here's how it was: 100 years ago we were so afraid of grieving the Holy Spirit, that in our zeal we outlawed everything that remotely seemed inappropiate.

Here's how it is now: We scour the pages of the Bible to find justification for our behavior.

And that's the truth!!!