Where the wild feeds are

When Bill Gates uses the F-word, it doesn't show up on TV. But Web sites featuring raw satellite transmissions let it all hang out.

By Frank Houston

Jul 29, 1999 | "I did not wash my hair last night because I felt a certain amount of stiffness was probably healthy," Dan Rather says to a producer as he prepares to go on air with a report from Soweto, South Africa. "What do you think? OK, OK, the question is whether or not to wash it for tomorrow, but we'll make that decision as we go along, I guess."

Such are the weighty choices our news anchors are forced to make from day to day. Rather likely did not expect to be discussing his coiffure on public view, but he is. This peek behind the curtain of the TV news business is known as a "wild feed" -- one of the unscripted, random moments found in the raw satellite transmissions used by TV networks and affiliates to send live sound and video from one location to another. The feeds are sometimes scrambled by the networks. But often they aren't, and they can be intercepted by anyone with a satellite dish who knows where to point it. Wild feeds reveal some of the embarrassingly creaky machinery beneath the high-gloss Oz of broadcast television -- and these days they can be found online.

Comedic actor Harry Shearer's Web site features the Rather clip, as well as some choice words from Bill Gates: "We fucked up. We look really stupid. We look like these greedy fools," and Geraldo Rivera, who is overheard saying that if he were Ron Goldman's father, "I'd want to strangle the motherfucker." (O.J. Simpson, that is.) Jed Rosenzweig's Wild Feed TV site boasts film rushes from a Calvin Klein underwear commercial starring Christy Turlington, among other fun clips.

A computer screen still seems an odd place to watch TV, but these purveyors of wild feeds suggest that the Web may, in fact, be the ideal medium for certain kinds of video. The potential of a global audience can be had for the relatively inexpensive cost of maintaining a Web site; only public access television has production prices to match, but it has nowhere near the reach or the always-on quality of the Internet. Besides, wild feeds belong to a different medium than television: It is precisely TV's special form of mediation between event and audience that is the subject of the wild feed parodies.

Until recently, wild feeds have been the province of a handful of experienced satellite hobbyists. "Those of us with satellite dishes often get a completely different perspective on a news event than the regular TV viewer gets," an enthusiast, Gary Bourgois, writes on his Web site. "We see activities occurring before the rest of the country, and sometimes after the event, with camera and microphone still hot, a politico or celeb will drop a comment that they think is being heard just by those in the room, but is actually transmitted to those dish-heads lucky enough to find that particular feed at that particular time."

It's no wonder that some people want to share wild feeds with a larger public, and have turned to the Web as the perfect vehicle for "broadcasting" the clips.

Next Page: What does Tom Brokaw think of his appearance on wild feeds?

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