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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm
Subject: Re: Stargate
Message-ID: <952@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Aug-86 14:22:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.952
Posted: Wed Aug 27 14:22:32 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Aug-86 22:41:51 EDT
References: <387@omen.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 47

First of all, I would not consider it to be an absolute certainty that
WTBS will go ahead with scrambling soon, mainly due to the various
Congressional actions regarding scrambling in general which are
currently stirring up a lot of confusion (watch C-SPAN for the details).
Many programming services (including some religious operations) are
claiming that they are being "forced" to scramble by cable company
coercion, and this has some Congressmen livid.  In general, the advertiser-
supported services are not thrilled about scrambling in any case, and
I think would happily avoid it if they could.  This is a rapidly 
evolving issue.

If scrambling does take place:

1) The Videocipher scrambling system apparently does not damage the 
   vertical interval data.
2) Only DIRECT satellite receivers of WTBS would need a descrambler,
   all sites receiving materials from cable TV would already be 
   descrambled at the cable company headend.
3) I have discussed the issue of key fees (for decoding WTBS)
   with SSS.  This issue isn't fully worked out since scrambling
   has yet to occur, but I can see a couple of possibilities:

   a) The data subscriber would not need to pay the fee normally
      imposed on a viewer of WTBS, since they only want to watch
      the SSS data, not the WTBS programs.

   or:

   b) To keep things simple, the fee would be paid, but it would be
      so small as to not be significant.  For example, even under
      the current pricing schedule (and Congressional action will
      most likely result in lower prices by forcing people like HBO,
      etc. to sell to third-party groups at lower rates), the
      rates for advertiser-supported services are comparatively low.
      The package of both CNN and CNN2, for example, costs less than $2/mo.

My own suspicion is that SSS will attempt to set things up so that
their data feeds don't have to pay any standard WTBS key fee.  But given
all the confusion right now over Congressional action on scrambling,
etc., the detailed handling of this issue is somewhere down the line.

Anyway, even in the WORST case I would not expect to see significant
key fees (SSS doesn't want them, either!)  and in any case the whole
issue only affects users with their own earth stations, not
cable TV subscribers.

--Lauren--