SilverWook said:

It's not my stuff. My house isn't big enough for dead video formats as it is. ;)

I knew a guy with one of those big dishes in his backyard when I was in college. He apparently saw a lot interesting stuff on those live feeds.

Are those big dishes still usable in this crazy digital age?

The Big Dishes are sill alive and in fact there are still quite a bit of raw feeds and a lot of programming. The the receivers are inexpensive and have HiDef with the latest video codecs, They have hard drive and memory card storage for recording and but it takes a lot of patience to get set up the programs are scattered all over the sky. It is a niche market now more then ever.