Any new hd channel additions coming soon?
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If you happen to follow the quarterly thread over at DBSTalk, Satracer over there, who evidently works for DirecTV and must have some inside knowledge? States that there are "several" additions coming this year. I do not know how many "several" is, but he seems to indicate that we can expect one or two new basic HD channels before April, the last I have read anyway.
They announced we'd see TruTV go HD last March, I would think that will happen before March Madness.
Beyond that, nothing I know of other than more local markets getting HD this year.
Beyond that, nothing I know of other than more local markets getting HD this year.
DIRECTV would appear, by scholarly research, to be up against the wall on HD bandwidth. As such it doesn't seem reasonable to expect much until DIRECTV 14 goes into operation in late Q1 or early Q2 2014. DIRECTV 15 seems currently slated for service in early 2015. It is notable that this is an accelerated schedule as compared with the original plans
The assumption is that DIRECTV 10's backup propulsion system holds out for two more years after the primary system failed last summer. There seems little reason to believe that it won't.
Astrium Picked To Build DirecTV 15 Telecom Satellite | SpaceNews.com
If they do as they did last year and add Spanish language HD to 119W, that doesn't much count with the lion's share of subscribers.
Satracer's comment was "several in the next couple of months, then more after that.It won't be next few weeks, but barely after that. ". Some premium, some basic.
harshness said:
They put up the new Sat last year and I think shared with the other one .... 103ca and 103cb, ca wa the original one, where did all the bandwidth from 103cb go ?
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DIRECTV 12 was supposed to be an in-orbit spare.
There are only so many transponders that they can send from each slot so doubling up on the satellites doesn't necessarily double up on the bandwidth.
What channels are you seeing? There are differences but not much. For example ABC Family is HD on DT not HD on Dish but LMN is HD on Dish and not on DT
As a former Dish customer also, I can state that the picture quality of DirecTV is significantly better than Dish. It's nice to see a provider taking quality seriously. Dish wasn't horrible or even close to U-Verse levels of awful, but there's noticeably less compression on DirecTV and those differences are clear on a 67" 1080p DLP.
YES! I agree 100%!
The HD image quality on D* is significantly better than E*. This is much more important to me than having more (so called) HD channels.
Some of us here have been saying this for MANY, MANY years now ...
QUALITY over quantity.
Hmmm,
Didn't know that, I figured, if they had another Sat up there with another 32 transponder, that thats what they had to work with, 32 more transponders.
Now you know. DIRECTV has three birds there now so they're pretty effectively using all the Ka bandwidth granted to them. They are granted a total of 1GHz (19.7-20.2GHz A band + 18.3-18.8GHz B band). It is important to correct your number of transponders as there are only 24 per band with the Ka frequencies.
Ka transponders are 32MHz wide while Ku transponders are only 24MHz wide. Both use a 500Mhz band so you can get 32 transponders into a Ku band but only 24 transponders on a Ka band. The usable bandwidth with the Ka setup is about 10% more efficient (probably because they don't need so many guard bands between transponders). On the other hand, if you look at how many channels they get per transponder, the yield isn't proportionally higher.
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