Today's show we finally get to the DirecTV and Dish Network discussion we've been wanting to do. We pepper in some comments on Cable and Over-the-Air as well.
- Sunday Ticket - up to 10 HD football games
- Special games in HD from NCAA, MLB, NHL, and NBA
Future
While DirecTV has not stated exactly which channels will be available. We have been able to determine that there will be at least 40 new national HD channels. The obvious channels would be Food Network, HGTV, A&E, Starz and Cinemax. That still leaves 35 new channels. We know that a lot of networks have plans to go HD. Recently CNBC has renovated its studio. You have to think it was done with HD in mind. Now you can see how much money you are making with crisp clear text on the ticker.
Equipment
- A DIRECTV® HD System
- A DIRECTV HD or HD DVR Receiver
- A 3 or 5 LNB DIRECTV multi-satellite dish
- An Off-Air Antenna (optional)
- If you cannot get local channels in HD from DIRECTV, you'll need an off-air antenna to see network (ABC, CBS, NBC or FOX) prime-time programming in HD.*
Quality
The HD picture on DirecTV ranges from good to stunning. By the way, the worst HD picture is better than the absolute best SD picture hands down. With that said DirecTV had some issues at first with HD. They try to dynamically add bits to the HD picture as its needed. So in simple scenes the picture is highly compressed. And that's OK for simple scenes but when you have a complex scene with a lot of motion compression will destroy the picture quality. So DirecTVs architecture will steal bits from another channel that has a simple scene and add it to a channel with a complex scene. When they first tried this it failed miserably. The first week of Sunday Ticket football stole bits from everywhere and and ruined the picture for everyone. They have improved this to the point where the picture looks good across the board. However, they still have to shut down a HD channel on Sunday during the football season because there is not enough bandwidth to go around. They are also moving to mpeg 4. This will provide a better picture with less data. So far I have been watching both mpeg4 and mpeg2 channels and can't tell teh difference between the two.
In general national HD channels look better than the networks. For my locals I prefer to use an antenna and get them over the air. ESPN is the best in HD sports. HD Net and HD Net movies provides a great 1080i picture. Standard definition for popular channels are pretty good. But for some of the lesser watched stuff its pretty bad.
Dish Network HD
Channels
The HDTV packages offered by Dish Network range in price from $49.99/month for the bronze package, to $99.99/month for the platinum package. The bronze package includes 26 High Definition Channels:
- Animania HD
- Family Room HD
- GamePlay HD
- Discovery HD Theater
- Equator HD
- DISH Network PPV in HD
- Film Fest HD
- Food Network HD
- HDNet Movies
- Kung Fu HD
- Monsters HD
- World Cinema HD
- HDNews
- Rave HD
- ESPN HD
- ESPN2 HD
- NFL Network HD
- Rush HD
- WorldSport HD
- Gallery HD
- HDNet
- HGTV HD
- TNT HD
- Treasure HD
- Ultra HD
- Universal HD
The silver package adds 120 more standard def channels. The gold package adds 40 SD channels and 1 HD channel:
- National Geographic Channel HD
The platinum package adds three "premium" HD channels, bringing the grand total to 30:
- Showtime HD
- Starz HDTV
- HBO HD
It costs and extra $5.99/month to get your local channels, some of which may be available in high definition. This varies by market. In our local Orange County market, we can get 24 local stations, four of which (CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX) are in HD.
For 2006 Dish Network was well ahead of the curve for national HD content. While DirecTV has announced, or hinted at, getting to 40 national channels sometime in 2007, Dish Network is still in the lead. It probably won't take much work to stay there either. There's absolutely no reason Dish wouldn't add every channel DirecTV is planning to add - unless it's owned by Fox.
Equipment
Dish has a basic HD STB and an HD DVR called the Vip-622. The 622 is a great product - very easy to use and it works very well. Some cool, unique, features are it's multiroom functionality, the ability to download content to the pocket Dish, and the ability to record three programs at once, if you're got an OTA antenna connected. It doesn't seem to want to buffer shows, and allow you to record from where you started watching, so that's one drawback.
Quality
The picture quality on Dish Network is very good. Compared with Cable, Dish is always as good, if not better in terms of picture quality. Compared with over the air, Dish is always close, sometimes not as good, but never bad.
Other features
Dish network has a video on demand service available that isn't really much to talk about. The movies aren't in high definition, and there's usually only two or three movies available to choose from. Compared with Cable that has hundreds of movies options, the VOD is essentially a non-factor.
