HDTV boxes future with DirectTV

[jzoomer]

I have a friend that bought a Samsung 160 box – HDTV DirectTV and OTA. Nice box. He doesn’t subscribe to showtime or HBO so all he basically gets on the satellite for HDTV is HDNET.

I am wondering if DirectTV will face the same hurdle that DISH did when they went to add more HDTV channels. With the older error-correction scheme, DISH could only fit 1 channel of HDTV per transponder while with the new turbo-code scheme they can fit 2 channels. It seems that if DirectTV starts adding more HDTV channels, they will also have to go to some other scheme.

Assuming this happens, are these boxes upgradeable like the DISH 6000 receiver? Are there any more HDTV channels on the roadmap yet for DirectTV?

[Mike123abc]

That is a good question that I have not seen DirecTV address. Dish changed from QPSK to 8PSK to give themselves more bandwith on the transponder. With E7/E8 they can get upwards of 50 megabit/sec, with old weak satellites like E1/2/3 they currently get 40mbit/sec. This is compared to 35mbit/sec DirecTV gets for its transponders.

Direct TV could probably squeeze 2 channels on a transponder assuming that both signals do not peak past 17 mbit/sec at the same time. Using the new technology Dish could squeeze 3 channels on the more powerful transponders on the new satellites (more power to allow error correction overhead to be lower).

[jzoomer]

Does anyone know what Directv plans are for HDTV? It looks like there is an increasing amount of content becoming available this year. But if Directv can only get half the number of HDTV channels per transponder, it seems like they will be at a disadvantage to the DISH plan.

This is why I am wondering whether the current set of Directv HDTV boxes has an upgrade path or if Directv really has a plan to add more HDTV channels. There seems to be a hole in the plan here.

[Curtis0620]

They added a full time PPV channel today (ch 198).