LATEST ADDITIONS

Five hundred channels of television will soon be available to <A HREF="http://www.echostar.com/">EchoStar</A>'s DISH Network subscribers. On July 19, EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen demonstrated DISH 500, a pizza-sized dish antenna capable of receiving signals from satellites in two locations. The demo took place at the <A HREF="http://www.sbca.org/">Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association</A>'s national exposition in Las Vegas.

Despite high-definition television's official debut last year, it still has virtually no audience&mdash;the equipment needed to receive it is still too expensive for all but the wealthiest early adopters. No audience means no ad revenue, and in the world of commercial broadcasting, no ad revenue means no budget for program development.

Last week, the 26th mission of the Space Shuttle <I>Columbia</I> touched down with a payload of high-definition footage, taken with an HD camcorder. The mission, which lasted five days and concluded last week, was the 95th so far. <A HREF="http://www.nasa.gov">NASA</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/professional">Sony</A> will research these high-resolution images of Shuttle mission STS-93, including footage of the deployment of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

We've all seen the TV commercials: KFC's Colonel Sanders, Taco Bell's little sad-eyed Chihuahua, and a warrior princess from Pizza Hut fighting hordes of robot invaders from George Lucas' <I>The Phantom Menace</I>. But the blitzkrieg of clever <I>Star Wars</I>-theme ads for Tricom Global Restaurants, released just prior to the film's debut, has fallen flat. A marketing deal Tricom signed with <A HREF="http://www.lucasfilm.com/">Lucasfilm</A> has proven "surprisingly ineffective at driving sales," according to the company's chairman and CEO, Andrall E. Pearson.