A<B>ll Quiet on the Western Front</B> (DVD)<BR><I>Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, William Bakewell. Directed by Lewis Milestone. Aspect ratio: 1.33:1. Dolby Digital mono. B&W. 130 minutes. 1930. Universal 20510. NR. $24.98.</I>

The nation's 10 million satellite TV subscribers may soon be able to receive local broadcasts through their dish antennas, thanks to a bill passed in Washington on Thursday, November 18. Direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) services had been hamstrung in their efforts to compete with cable companies because of <A HREF="http://www.fcc.gov/">Federal Communications Commission</A> restrictions that forbade them to retransmit local signals within areas reachable by stations originating those signals.

All was going reasonably well with HDTV until recently, when <A HREF="http://www.sbgi.com">Sinclair Broadcasting Company</A>, which owns several TV stations around the US, threw the FCC a curveball by claiming that the adopted 8-VSB standard was insufficient to roll HDTV out around the country. Sinclair had conducted tests which, it said, proved that the COFDM technology, favored by European and Asian broadcasters, would be a better choice. (See <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?553">previous report</A>.)

A new Nielsen report claims that kids are watching slightly less TV than they were 10 years ago, but another study claims that they are spending almost an entire work week, every week, with media of all kinds. That's the conclusion of <I>Kids & Media @ The New Millennium</I>, released recently by the Menlo Park, California philanthropic organization <A HREF="http://www.kff.org/">The Kaiser Family Foundation</A>. TV and music are by far the biggest occupiers of kids' time, the report states, with computers and the Internet a distant second. Reading for pleasure&mdash;that done apart from schoolwork&mdash;occupies only about 45 minutes per day for 80% of the children surveyed.