From: roberts@triton.unm.edu (Robert Smathers)
Subject: Re: What I watched on New Year's
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 93 05:56:20 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque


Continuing in Jay's posting of what he did for New Year's, I'll tell you
what I did.

I turned on the dish at 11:35pm ET and caught Jay Leno's Tonight Show
LIVE.  I looked for commercial-free feeds, but I didn't find any.  I
attribute it to the fact NBC does a lot of network programming from Burbank
so they were set up to insert commercials into the program.

After the ball dropped in NYC, I watched the local news and Married
with Children.  Married... runs over the hour by 10 minutes, so I missed
finding a central time zone celebration.

When the time came around for my time zone to celebrate, I watched
an over-the-air station local celebration.  The Sandia Peak Tramway
tramcar with thousands of candlelight power lights goes from the top
of the mountain to the base and reaches the base just as midnight
strikes.  It is a tradition in Albuquerque.   So I cheered and had
a good time celebrating 1993 locally.

After a few mintues of that, I watched a satellite TV tradition
of mine, "New Year's LIVE".  It is a program that originates from KRON-TV
San Francisco.  The cities of Seattle, Los Angeles (Disneyland), Las
Vegas, and San Francisco are linked together by satellite.  Microwave
trucks link sites within each city together and the bundle is uplinked
in one video feed.  The program goes from city to city around the link
showing what types of New Year's Eve celebrations go on.  

I find it an amazing piece of technological broadcasting.  I can imagine
how much preparation goes into it -- the linking of microwave trucks to
some central uplink site in each city as well as getting the signal
to satellite for distribution to many other cities all up and down
the west coast and in Alaska.  The distribution feeds were found on Telstar
301/23 and on GSTAR-4.  The backhaul sites for the cities (all but San
Francisco) were on GSTAR-2.  

The most touching part before midnight struck had to be this:  the main
anchor in the Transamerica Pyramid in S.F. got up out of his
chair, walked to a globe, and showed the viewers some things.

He started out at the International Date Line.  He said something like, "
21 hours ago 1993 started out here at the International Date Line.  It is
likely the islanders first celebrated 1993."

He then slowly turned the globe.

"Next, 1993 fell in the Commonwealth of Independent States, freed recently."

Then he turns the globe and continues...

"1993 then appeared in the troubled Middle East, starving Africa, and
Europe".

" and now it has fallen in the United States..."

Very touching the way he touched the globe as he spoke and painted
an "emotional" picture that you could see the TV pictures in your imagination.

Good parts of the telecast.  A couple got married and the cameras were
there, the Seigfried and Roy show was partly shown...

Overall, a good telecast and I hope those of you that saw it 
thought it was what I promised and much more.

Not a bad night.... I got to see New Years celebrations in 3 out of the
4 Continental U.S. time zones.

Robert
roberts@triton.unm.edu

Newsgroups: rec.video.satellite
From: dingram@dims.demon.co.uk ("Darren P. Ingram")