Buffy The Vampire Slayer

’Spoiler whore" may not sound like a compliment, but to some it’s a moniker of honour.

Leon Hussissian earned it by tuning in satellite transmissions in the middle of the night and giving fans of the TV drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer what they crave most: detailed story descriptions before the show airs on television.

"I am proud to call myself a spoiler whore," he writes in an e-mail. (Wary of strangers, telephone contact was vetoed. With some coaxing he agreed to be identified for this article. Hussissian isn’t doing anything illegal as long as he doesn’t provide video clips or reprint the script, but a committed spoiler whore can’t be too careful.)

About 36 hours before most of North America watches Buffy on Tuesday nights, Hussissian punches a set of co-ordinates into his satellite tuner. His big dish swings to find the correct bird, and for the next hour he’s in heaven: Buffy without commercials. He takes notes, then posts details on his Web site (http://www.leoffonline.com), which also contains three years of Buffy episode spoilers as well as details on past seasons of Alias, Angel and Enterprise.

There’s no money in it, but the 35-year-old audio-visual technician from Wauconda, Ill., says he enjoys the attention from the on-line spoiler community, some of whom, he explains, "have become a second family." For him the big thrill is "having a secret and you get to blurt it out to everyone."

Cult TV shows draw some satellite owners to wildfeeds, sporting events draw others. Wildfeeds are raw transmissions of TV shows, sporting events or news reports sent via satellite. It’s how American networks send shows to their affiliate stations and Canadian broadcasters, and how TV news reporters feed live reports home.

What Hussissian and Victor Fernandes of Cambridge, Ont., enjoy finding are the feeds they are not supposed to be watching.

"I can find channels that people are paying $20 a month for," brags Fernandes, who has been watching wildfeeds for more than 20 years. He has a 16-foot satellite dish in his backyard, though it will be replaced by a 35-footer — that’s right, big enough to fill your back yard — that he recently bought.

Knowing where the wildfeeds are isn’t just a hobby, it is his business. He sells and services big dishes, but mostly spends time hunting down European soccer games, Brazilian soap operas and Arabic channels for his customers.

Some of those feeds are listed on Web sites or in a satellite listings guide, but true wildfeeders prefer to go it alone: "It’s got to be up there some place," he says, "If you’ve got a big enough dish you can find it."

Doug Skinner, director of the C-Band Alliance of Canada, a satellite lobby group, kindly describes Fernandes and Hussissian as "dedicated satellite surfers."

"They’ll sit up all night searching the skies for these wildfeeds. They’ll phone each other and say: ’Look, I just found the Canadiens playing Toronto,’ and 20 of them will swing their satellites over and watch that feed. It’s a techie thing: I can get it, you can’t."

Many of these feeds are sent unscrambled over public airwaves, but are considered "off-air" by the industry.

Wildfeeds are worth finding because there are no commercials, no station logos and, if you are lucky, no sense of propriety by the play-by-play announcers or reporters using the feed.

"You can catch some funny, off-colour stuff because they assume no one is watching," says Skinner, whose back-yard 7-foot, 6-inch dish has picked up a number of unguarded moments.

For the most part, it’s silly stuff, like U.S. President George Bush using a sound check to remind listeners that he’s not Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey (revealed in the satirical 1992 documentary Feed) or Arnold Schwarzenegger practising a chuckle or George Stephanopoulos powdering his nose.

But it can get bitchy, such as when Tom Brokaw was caught dissing Dan Rather. In 1996, Brokaw was anchoring The NBC Nightly News from the Republican convention in San Diego. While rehearsing segments over the satellite link with staff in New York he made disparaging remarks about Rather’s news judgment. The comments were picked up by 25-year-old wildfeeder Jed Rosenzweig. He is a video artist who, at the time, was compiling his favourite wildfeed funnies into a New York public-access cable show called Wild Feed TV. The Brokaw tape was his biggest coup, but threatening letters from NBC lawyers, who called the satellite interception illegal, kept that clip off the air.

To catch a wildfeed, you’ve got to have the right equipment, and when it comes to satellite dishes, size matters. Small pizza-like dishes won’t do, they’re not powerful enough and work on a different frequency. It’s the large dishes, at least the 6-foot wide receivers, that are needed.

Big-dish owners who add consumer channel services, such as Bell ExpressVu, StarChoice or the illegal-in-Canada U.S. DirectTV, to their set-ups will have to disable those systems to search for wildfeeds.

The motors on the big dishes, also known as C-Band or Ku analogue receivers, need to be able to swing the dish, allowing it to lock onto satellites in different geostationary orbits.

It’s an expensive hobby. Satellite starter kits begin at $2,000, and that goes up if you want to receive digital signals. Broadcasters and production companies, such as CBC and Warner Bros., are switching over to digital satellite feeds. It’s more economical (several digital signals fit where one analogue picture did) and somewhat more secure. Tuning in a digital wildfeed requires newer, more expensive equipment, which the majority of satellite owners don’t have.

That’s why ER spoiler sites (ER is produced by Warner Bros.) are few and far between, while Buffy (still sent on an analogue feed) has spoiler whores trumpeting their wares all over the Web.

The move to digital transmissions may make things harder for dedicated satellite surfers, or those who, like Hussissian, feel "a self-appointed debt to the spoiler whores of Buffy," but it won’t make it impossible. They won’t let it. "I found stuff yesterday that no one knew was up there," says Fernandes.