albania

I didn’t thing I said never. But there are a few issues at hand here, first is that the universe is full of stuff, including background radiation that is everywhere even in sectors of "empty space". As photons travel through space they interact with what’s around them. They deviate in course they lose energy and they get absorbed. Second, even assuming there was a sector of empty space and direct path from your light beam to whomever you were transmitting to you'd still never be able to get the full message across at any distance. This is so because it is impossible to create photons that will travel perfectly parallel to each other and there are practical size constraints to making a receiver. As the distance to your intended target increases you'll need a bigger and bigger receiver to pick up the complete message. If you could travel all the way out to infinity you'd need an infinitely large receiver. All these things make my intuitive physicist side tingle; my gut feeling is that no one will be seeing crappy reruns of any show here on earth sixty light years away.

At distances of the earth and solar system even it's not as bad, but we have help we know the approximate location of the receivers and transmitters and of the stuff in between them, and all sorts of clever tricks make it possible for us to share information effectively.