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Thursday - January 6, 2005
Grrrr. DirecTV
So DirecTV had several large announcements from CES today. The biggest is here. At first, everything is happy. They're going to start offering HD local channels to the 12 top markets. Great news.
Then comes the following:
HD local programming will be received via a single dish -- slightly larger than the current standard dish -- and customers will require new HD set top boxes due to new compression technology.
What! After reading some other releases about the new compression, eventually all the HD channels will be moved over.....which renders that nice $1,000 HDTiVo basically useless. Of course it can still record OTA signals and SD DirecTV channels, but that just sucks. Also, they announced a new non-TiVo DVR, so it's questionable whether they will ever release a new HDTiVo for replacement. They will probably offer whatever generic PVR they come out with next. It's a sad day......
Full CES DirecTV press releases can be found here.
Some good news came from TiVo though. They are going to introduce a Cable card compatible TiVo. Hopefully they will offer HD recording and dual tuners. I've been a loyal customer of DirecTV ever since I got my first DirecTiVo unit, but if you take away TiVo, I will probably jump ship along with a large number of other users.
Posted by jcraven at January 6, 2005 3:01 PM