Predicting earthquakes using disturbances in DTH TV transmission
I think that if there are disturbances caused by something preceding earthquake, they might be used.

The problem is that you need to find which cause produces that effect and measure it. For example you can team up with geologists, geophysicists or someone similar and try to build as complete hypothesis as possible and then design experiment to gather data. If your experiment would bring some non noise data then you can start to thinking about machine learning algorithms which will work in this situation.

But you might also try to do it on "brute force" way by actually recording DTH TV images in seismically unstable regions and try to correlate those videos with seismic data. Then after some manual examination and categorization you could define (or not if this cause and effect hypothesis is wrong) some possible glitches that are observed and try to develop software that tries to detect them (OpenCV might be useful for example).

IMHO in either way, some domain knowledge related to earthquakes would be more useful on beginning stage, and experience related to machine learning would be more useful on latest stages of such ambitious project.