Still doubtful, Meybodi grabbed a piece of fruit from a wooden tureen sitting on the nearby coffee table.
“What am I holding?” he asked. By this time Atabay and others had filtered into the makeshift studio.
“An apple,” replied the caller.
Before long, everyone in the studio was weeping, and calls began pouring in from all over Iran. It turns out NITV reached Iran as the result of a technical snafu; someone at Eutelsat, the French satellite company, had flipped the wrong switch.
When he realized he could reach into Iranian living rooms, Atabay’s programming turned political. He wasn’t the first to beam dissent into Iran. Since the early 1980s, expats had been staging sporadic assaults on Iranian airwaves, mostly via short-wave, which regular Iranian radios receive. But after NITV’s launch, with the cost of satellite airtime dropping and dishes sprouting from rooftops throughout the Middle East, Iranian exiles flocked to long-distance broadcasting.
As a result, Iranians can now tune into twenty-six television and twelve radio stations produced by expatriates, if they have the right equipment — and many do. There are 17 million radios in Iran, and an estimated 3 million to 4 million houses have satellite connections, in spite of the government’s longstanding satellite ban.
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