free up room for more channels

Think of those extra entries like shortcuts on your desktop. They don't take up much space. In the case of HDNet, ESPN, and other channels that have been in HD for a while, they are in the process of transitioning to the new MPEG-4 encoding, so removing the older feeds will free up space.

Plus, Friday Night Lights will be on The 101 this year .. don't want that to go away.

Doug Brott said:

Plus, Friday Night Lights will be on The 101 this year .. don't want that to go away.

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I love FNL also but I know where the channel is. Don't need it in different places. The 101 is on 101. Don't need it anywhere else do we?

It's not like they use any additional space on the satellites (aside from the mpeg2/mpeg4 duplicates, which are being phased out) - once a channel is uplinked, any additional listing in the guide is nothing more than an additional link to that individual channel. DirecTV doesn't use additional transponder space for each duplicate listing.

say-what said:

It's not like they use any additional space on the satellites (aside from the mpeg2/mpeg4 duplicates, which are being phased out) - once a channel is uplinked, any additional listing in the guide is nothing more than an additional link to that individual channel. DirecTV doesn't use additional transponder space for each duplicate listing.

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Oh ok. Learning more every day here. Thanks.

Back in the day (like the original boxes), you could see this duplication as you switched from one channel to its duplicate, the box didn't retune, just changed the banner. The current boxes all retune, so the channels look different.

Common practice with digital systems. XM uses the same trick for sports channels that are off like the baseball game channels when there is no game, playing highlights from the MLB channel on one stream that is duplicated to several channel numbers.

priester68 said:

Would it help free up room for more channels if Directv didn't have channels like 101, HDNet, etc, in several different places in the guide?

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As others have said, the duplicates (except old MPEG-2 HD feeds which are being phased out) don't take up any actual space... My question is a little the opposite.. since they don't take up any space, why don't they mirror the HD feed on the 101 as well as the sd feed?

Stuart Sweet said:

Think of those extra entries like shortcuts on your desktop. They don't take up much space. In the case of HDNet, ESPN, and other channels that have been in HD for a while, they are in the process of transitioning to the new MPEG-4 encoding, so removing the older feeds will free up space.

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I haven't seen anything indicating that the freed-up space on 101, 110 and 119 will be used for new HD. I suspect it that some of it will go to moving international off of 95.

priester68 said:

Would it help free up room for more channels if Directv didn't have channels like 101, HDNet, etc, in several different places in the guide?

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I would be against HDNet going away. I pay $9.99 a month for HD just to get that channel. Now if someone else wants to cover Mixed Martial Arts like they do then fine.

Ditto, HDNet has some good programming.

joshjr said:

I would be against HDNet going away. I pay $9.99 a month for HD just to get that channel. Now if someone else wants to cover Mixed Martial Arts like they do then fine.

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He wasn't expecting it to go away, just commenting that it was taking up two channels MPEG2 and MPEG4 (but probably not too much longer.).

Jimmy 440 said:

Ditto, HDNet has some good programming.

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Not much any more, Namely where is our NHL this year? No where to be found. So All's I will watch is a little, like SOME of those movie trailer shows, max, that's all. Sad HDNet, Bring NHL back.:nono: