Direct vs. Dish

Directv charges $299 up front to lease their HD DVR so your not winning on either side. You need to compare package prices and content between the two for starters, all that info is available on their website. Also see if either is offering any new customer specials.

If you need local channels via the sat, check both to see if they offer locals in your market, if not, you'll need to install an OTA antenna to receive them as long as you are close enough to your local broadcast towers.

Overall Dish has more HD content available at this time, Directv should surpass that sometime mid 2007 when their next round of sats go up.

There are plenty of past discussions on this topic here, some searching should turn them up.

You might not be a fan of cable but it sounds like you might be better off with them. No contracts and no upfront costs.

Something else to keep in mind is that D* advertises HD and will bill you for HD, but delivers HD-lite.

Also, what guarantee is there that there will actually be ENOUGH new HD channels for D* to be able to surpass E* when the new satellites go up? I hear this a lot around here, but it sounds to me like more assumption than anything else. I mean, any new channels will probably be picked up sooner or later by E* also I would think, and D* isn't planning on adding the VOOM channels, are they? I seriously doubt if any new channels are going to only be exclusively offered to D*, unless they have some kind of plans to produce their own stations that I haven't heard. (Even if they did, how good could they possibly be?)

I know that D* has supposedly SAID that they will be adding channels, but who's to say that E* isn't planning on adding any either? Just because D* SAYS they will have the most means nothing, as far as I'm concerned - they also are currently "saying" in their TV ads that they have the "best quality" HD .

I'm not trying to bash any one service - I'm just trying to be realistic about the situation, and I'm wondering if their isn't a certain amount of "wishful thinking" involved, when I hear someone sounding so sure that D* will be so much ahead in the near future.

I believe I used the word should have more, never stated they actually will...

The fact is DirecTV will have the capacity for ~150 national HD channels. What channels they actually add is not yet known.

Dish Network has not announced what their HD plans are. It's generally believed they are limited at this time for adding new HD, with no known additional capacity in the plans.

As far as new HD channels, expect to see major growth this year.

A possibility is DirecTV selling some of their HD capacity to Dish.

The only reason i am now getting DishNetwork is because it has NTV(bengali channel) which DTV doesn't have.

also why are the D* and E* words being censored?

E* is short for echostar which then became short for DishNetwork.

D* is short for Directv.

It has to be 720p or 1080i to be considered HD. The problem with Directv's current national HD channels is they don't have enough available bandwidth to pass them all so they downconvert their 1080i channels from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 1080. Technically it's still 1080i cause it has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution but it's been scaled down to save bandwidth. The 720p channels they offer (ABC, FOX, ESPN and ESPN2) are left at full resolution.

With the new MPEG4 local channels and the up coming MPEG4 national HD channels we are hoping Directv will be passing all 1080i channels at full 1920 x 1080 resolution but there is no easy way to determine that yet.

I'd prefer 50 HD HD stations to 150 crap ones. Whats the new capacity for?

The new capacity is to be able to support up to 150 national HD channels as they become available, there won't be that many national HD channels even broadcasting for some time.