OT - Voom Users? Options

[seanery]

I'm thinking about switching to Voom...it looks like a nice service with some good packages available.
Anyone use it and have comments about it?

[richardL]

QUOTE (Rider914 @ Jan 21 2005, 09:11 PM)

New satellites??? The birds just bounce back what you send to them. . .

DirectTV are limited on bandwidth and most of their transponders cover the entire Continental US (CONUS). The new Spaceway satellites are entirely spotbeam and can be reconfigured on the fly (they were originally designed for Internet service). So they will use the 4 new sats to take over the HD LiL service - sending local channels to just the appropriate geographic area. This is much more efficient and allows them to ultimately provide enough 'focussed' bandwidth to provide the HD channels for every one of the 210 DMAs. They will have capacity for around 1500local HD channels and maybe 200 national HD channels (on CONUS transponders).

They are switching from MPEG2 to MPEG4 which is hardware decoded in the receiver and no DTV receivers currently allow that. They are also switching from QPSK to 8PSK modulation (effectively allows more bandwidth on the transponder) and the new sats are Ka instead of Ku band and that requires new LNBs, bigger dishes (to counter rainfade with Ka band) and new demodulators, which are also not currently in the receivers. So every stage will be new, and these engineering challenges always seem to take longer to reach reality.

The existing satellites (which are almost at capacity) will continue to do all the SD channels and SD locals (staying MPEG2) and existing HD channels - like HBOHD. Once all the local HD is MPEG4 and everyone is converted to MPEG4 ready HD receivers, the existing HD channels will also be swapped. They intend to pay for the dish conversion and receiver replacement when the time comes, for existing HD customers.

R