G
Guest
·I'm sitting here throughly bored for the evening and started thinking about why E* put the extra Philly locals on Telstar 7. I don't honestly believe that it was because of lack of bandwidth. I'm sure they could have found room for the few extra channels somewhere.
So here's a theory: Philly has a low concentration of subscribers because of Comcast Sports Net. Why not take advantage of that fact and use the city for a Proof of Concept. The 301 and 501 receivers that originally got the 129 code (and all of them now) have the ability to change from an E* receiver to a pretty much standard C-Band receiver. Proof that they can support two (or more) different standards on these boxes with minimal visibility to the end user.
Now, with the pending merger, they may have to do this again, but with D* signal rather than C-Band. They've already created code to use another standard on their boxes. It seems like it should be pretty simple now to convert to "dual signal" boxes after the merger.
I take all of this to mean that the E* boxes will all continue to work post merger, and that D* boxes will likely become the standard for all new subs. All they'd actually have to replace for existing customers is pre-301/501 boxes. This should mean a pretty substantial savings over any other equipment replacement solution. It also means the end of the DishPlayer, and with all of the problems, I imagine that they hope to do that anyway.
So here's a theory: Philly has a low concentration of subscribers because of Comcast Sports Net. Why not take advantage of that fact and use the city for a Proof of Concept. The 301 and 501 receivers that originally got the 129 code (and all of them now) have the ability to change from an E* receiver to a pretty much standard C-Band receiver. Proof that they can support two (or more) different standards on these boxes with minimal visibility to the end user.
Now, with the pending merger, they may have to do this again, but with D* signal rather than C-Band. They've already created code to use another standard on their boxes. It seems like it should be pretty simple now to convert to "dual signal" boxes after the merger.
I take all of this to mean that the E* boxes will all continue to work post merger, and that D* boxes will likely become the standard for all new subs. All they'd actually have to replace for existing customers is pre-301/501 boxes. This should mean a pretty substantial savings over any other equipment replacement solution. It also means the end of the DishPlayer, and with all of the problems, I imagine that they hope to do that anyway.