I have been feverishly searching the internet and I think it is not if you choose to implement it or not; it may be possible that the technology is now on the new Direct Satellites and when operational, they can do the same; or I am wrong
8PSK does not affect the satellite. DIRECTV could choose to turn it on their satellites if they wanted to do so.
8PSK as mentioned above is 3 bits per symbol 4PSK or QPSK is 2 bits/symbol. But since the symbol is more complicated (it can be in 8 different states rather than 4) it is harder for the receiver to figure out which symbol is being trasmitted. This comes into play with interference like rainfade. This is why Dish used 2/3 FEC with 8PSK and 5/6 with QPSK. This means that for 8PSK 1/3 of the bits are used for error correction and with QPSK they use 1/6, or 2x the error correction. This makes 8PSK only 35% or so more bandwidth rather than a simple 50% more.
DIRECTV uses Ka frequencies. They are much more succeptible to rain fade. Making it much more likely that 8PSK would fade out. The can compensate in 2 ways. One is to use more transmission power (which is limited by the satellite), another is to increase the amount of error correction to compensate.
Another consideration is that the receivers need to have 8PSK decoding hardware in them.
Dish elected to have all the HD in 8PSK since they upgraded the 6000 with the 8PSK module. Dish uses Ku frequencies, less succeptible to rain fade. Dish also has gone with a very conservative 2/3 FEC. 2/3 FEC Turbo encoded 8PSK has been shown to have less rainfade than 5/6 QPSK non turbo encode (I do not have a link to the study by some NASA scientist studying various encoding methods, but it was a very interesting paper but had a lot of equasions).
Essentially each provider has picked an encoding solution that they think is best. Dish, more limited by bandwidth, but having better spectrum for rain fade picked to go with 8PSK. DIRECTV has a ton of Ka bandwidth (each Ka slot has up to 2x the spectrum of a Ku slot (1GHZ vs 500MHZ)) elected to stay with QPSK.