This is particularly useful for obtaining live coverage of post-game press conferences or extended game highlights (melts), since the backhaul may stay up to feed these events after the network has concluded their broadcast.
In its early days, their hobby was strengthened by the fact that most backhaul was analog and in the clear (unscrambled or unencrypted) which made for a vast smorgasbord of free television available for the technically inclined amateur.
In recent years, full-time content and cable channels have added encryption and conditional access, and occasional signals are steadily becoming digital, which has had a deleterious effect on the hobby.
Some digital signals remain freely accessible (sometimes using Ku band dishes as small as one meter) under the international DVB-S standard or the US Motorola-proprietary Digicipher system.
The 1992 documentary Feed[citation needed] was compiled almost entirely using unedited backhaul from political campaign coverage by local and network television.