Dish HD Channel Moves Coming...

[SpaethCo]

Care to prove it? I'd love to see someone show the actual numbers of customers that sub to Center Ice and League Pass in HD.

The numbers aren't widely published -- for the life of me I can't find the article I read a couple months ago that said Center Ice subscriptions were up over a 500k this year. The only article I could find referenced 235k subscribers to Center Ice during the 2005-06 season. (those numbers would be low, coming off the 2004-05 lockout) Center Ice alone is $159/season, which works out to almost $23/mo for 7 months worth of hockey.

Is it enough to worry about? I don't know. I don't know how much money these packages generate compared to the 15 channels of HD PPV that Dish has.

This is an enthusiast board. Finding a couple of you does not prove your point. I still bet 95% of subs care only about their local RSNs.

Sure. How many people order HD PPV? What percentage of Dish subscribers do you think subscribe to HBO? If you work off the assumption of 8 HD channels per TP, Dish has a full TP of just HBO channels.

Right now it appears that Dish is using TP30 and some of TP20 on 61.5 to provide HD feeds for the 33 HD RSNs + ALTs, compared to D*'s 49 full time HD RSNs.

The annoying part for me is until looking at the Center Ice schedule on D* last year, I never wanted to switch from Dish. I'm happy with the channels I get from TurboHD Gold (unlike some vocals others) and with the sports pack my monthly bill is $66.96. To get the same crap on D* I have to sub to Choice Xtra + HD DVR plus the sports pack for $83.99. I have no reason to switch services other than getting more Center Ice games in HD -- and for Dish it's not like they don't have 95% of the contracts in place and have the channels already uplinked, they just don't have the TP capacity allocated to get them all going at the same time. Which is something they could rectify if they shuffled things around.

Heck, on your RSNs to spots idea, they could take the MPEG2 SD RSN feeds and move them to spots to free up room to only do HD MPEG4 RSNs on the CONUS TPs. Then just have it be a prereq that if you want to get the sports pack or NBA League Pass or NHL Center Ice that you needed ViP receivers.

 

[--sexy-warlock--]

When do the Encore theme channels launch in HD? That would be nice if they were making room for them.

 

[ehren]

The numbers aren't widely published -- for the life of me I can't find the article I read a couple months ago that said Center Ice subscriptions were up over a 500k this year. The only article I could find referenced 235k subscribers to Center Ice during the 2005-06 season. (those numbers would be low, coming off the 2004-05 lockout) Center Ice alone is $159/season, which works out to almost $23/mo for 7 months worth of hockey.

Is it enough to worry about? I don't know. I don't know how much money these packages generate compared to the 15 channels of HD PPV that Dish has.

Sure. How many people order HD PPV? What percentage of Dish subscribers do you think subscribe to HBO? If you work off the assumption of 8 HD channels per TP, Dish has a full TP of just HBO channels.

Right now it appears that Dish is using TP30 and some of TP20 on 61.5 to provide HD feeds for the 33 HD RSNs + ALTs, compared to D*'s 49 full time HD RSNs.

The annoying part for me is until looking at the Center Ice schedule on D* last year, I never wanted to switch from Dish. I'm happy with the channels I get from TurboHD Gold (unlike some vocals others) and with the sports pack my monthly bill is $66.96. To get the same crap on D* I have to sub to Choice Xtra + HD DVR plus the sports pack for $83.99. I have no reason to switch services other than getting more Center Ice games in HD -- and for Dish it's not like they don't have 95% of the contracts in place and have the channels already uplinked, they just don't have the TP capacity allocated to get them all going at the same time. Which is something they could rectify if they shuffled things around.

Heck, on your RSNs to spots idea, they could take the MPEG2 SD RSN feeds and move them to spots to free up room to only do HD MPEG4 RSNs on the CONUS TPs. Then just have it be a prereq that if you want to get the sports pack or NBA League Pass or NHL Center Ice that you needed ViP receivers.

You cannot move the RSNs to spots, the MLB territories are way too large.

 

[SpaethCo]

You cannot move the RSNs to spots, the MLB territories are way too large.

You can -- D* used to do that. You have to uplink the same RSN to multiple spots in order to make the full coverage of the market though, and some spots would have 2 RSNs where markets overlap.

It's probably not the wisest use of TP space, but it could be done.

 

[digiblur]

I thought these satellites were "bent pipes" and would transmit whatever was sent up to them?

They are but apparently there isn't enough power to run the uplinks in 8PSK mode for the normal consumer dish to receive them. So they run them in QPSK mode.

 

[navychop]

Ah. Thanks for the info.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Just got this in my inbox.

Please note a change from our previous communication. The activities schedule for the move of channels from satellite 129º into 110º and 61.5º into 77º are scheduled for tomorrow morning Thursday, July 23rd at 1 am MST.

We want to remind you of the change in satellite 110 / transponder 19 to 8PSK (HD) format occurred Wednesday, July 15th in preparation for the addition of several high definition programming services on this satellite, scheduled for Thursday, July 23rd. These services are existing channels which will be relocated from transponders 20 and 24 on the 129 satellite and include the following:

387 - CI
374 - FTV
9446 - WGN
541 - HDPPV
9457 - GREEN
544 - HDPPV
9495 - CBS C
5304 - FTV
9496 - SEDGE
9481 - TMC-E
9498 - STRZW
9500 - BIG10
9505 - ENCOR
9508 - NBATV


In conjunction with the change on the 110 satellite, the same services as listed above, currently on 61.5, transponder 21 will be relocated to the satellite at 77 degrees for Eastern Arc systems. All this events are marked in red in the attached document.


We also wanted to remind you of the HD local transfer for the Oklahoma City (OK), Tulsa (OK) and Birmingham (AL) markets. On July 15th the NBC and FOX networks will be transferring to satellite 129º. On July 29th all the HD local services for these three markets will be removed from the 119º orbital slot.

 

[tigerfan33]

I was wondering why half of my hd locals in Birmingham were split 119 and 129. That explains it.

 

[Poke]

Hmm wonder why their doing this with just those 3 markets?? I hope its a improvement on the OKC ones.

 

[digiblur]

I was wondering why half of my hd locals in Birmingham were split 119 and 129. That explains it.

They probably removed half of them so people would call in that were affected and say their channels were removed (probably very few). But yet they would still have a local or two to watch the news until their dish was upgraded.