Everyone remembers how horrifyingly huge the dishes for satellite TV used to be. Not too long ago they were a feature of the typical lawn set of tacky ornaments — which included a few statues or figurines and that strange, iridescent, decorative orb that sits in a birdbath of sorts. But then again, to say that the old satellites were a part of the lawn set is an understatement; they completely dominated it. Driving down your average small-town road in the eighties, lawn after lawn would look like a extraterrestrial data feed station. If you didn’t know otherwise, it wouldn’t be illogical or out of line to assume that everyone had a serious hobby in astronomy.
If you were that person uninitiated to the satellite phenomenon, it would surely come as a surprise to you to discover that the real purpose of the giant, metal bowl angled towards the sky and equipped with a rod at the center is to allow a household to tune in to additional sports games on TV, or watch the latest popular songs synched to music videos. Yes, behind all that clunky technology there existed one simple purpose: to watch television. It seemed like such a huge effort — literally — to satisfy an outwardly simple task of accessing TV stations beyond the standard four. Needless to say, it was a great sacrifice for the yard. Any gardening guru or lawn care aficionado must have either vehemently protested the giant grey equipment or, if they caved, battled with a serious moral dilemma.
Somewhere along the way, scientists came to the realization that the massivity of the satellite dish was superfluous. In fact, about nine tenths of it was dispensable. What this has meant for the 2000s is that lawns have been restored and the outer space launching pads in our backyards have disappeared. Today our satellite television consists of a much smaller dish — a serving bowl, if you will — that can easily be hidden from view by tucking it away on the back side of the garage roof.
Ironically, along with the advent of the smaller satellite came an inflow in abundance of more stations. Television genres have branched off and multiplied so that not only do there exist more types of shows on more stations, but we have stations dedicated entirely to one genre alone, no matter how niche or seemingly limited the genre may be. There are dozens of stations each for sports, sitcoms, music, movies, news, kids, and then there are the food stations, animal stations, women stations, men stations. And, to boot, all these channels can be transmitted to a TV with snazzy features such as surround sound and high definition, making the whole setup one that would kick the old satellite and its sister big-box, antennae-eared TV of the past to the curb. Now we can look back on the retro satellite and safely say it came, it went, and now it’s gone for good.