Dish HD STB + OTA

[miamicanes]

This might be a blatantly stupid question, but if I switch to Dish after Voom shuts down and buy a HD Dish receiver, will it handle local channels the same way Voom did (receiving them on the OTA antenna left behind by Voom, tuning them with the Dish STB, and seamlessly mapping them into the channel lineup)? Or will I have to jump back and forth between "Satellite mode" and "Terrestrial mode" and keep track of two modes and overlapping sets of channel numbers? Or, god forbid, deal with two receivers (the Dish receiver + the old Voom STB (for terrestrial) or a new terrestrial STB if Voom kills their boxes after shutdown)?

While I'm at it, if anyone knows the answer, is the situation with DirecTV any different?

Also... for multi-room subscriptions... Are subscriptions tied to a card, or to a specific card + receiver combo? In other words, can I buy multiple (unsubsidized, cardless) additional receivers on eBay, pay for one additional room/card, then freely move that card from receiver to receiver and watch TV using whichever box has the card inserted at that moment? And if I could... would the receiver work immediately (assuming the card itself were aware of its activation status), or would it still have to wait for some period of time to receive an OTA or phone authorization first?

 

[astrosfan]

It will function much as VOOM does. You will get your SD locals on the dish, but hd and digital(the 4 pbs, local radar) over the air. The main stations will show up show up with data. The other local digitals, ie 24-02 etc, will show up the the guide as local digital w/o data in the guide. So for the mainstation you'll get data. Also unlike voom you can get your analogs from OTA too, though no data.

So to sum it up YES yopu get them and they'll integrate into your guide. Also be very careful with installer. Mine knew nothing of local ota HD and kept saying that Dish didn't have the rights to them and did not understand when I told him about local OTA. When he left I looked through the installation menus until I got to local stations and added local digitals and analogs. Also double check the signal strength etc. My installer had the wrong elevation, 56 insteal of 50. Still missing VOOM.
Patrick

 

[SimpleSimon]

IF there's even a physical card (many new receivers don't have them - the chip is soldered to the mainboard) - it stays in the receiver it came with.

 

[miamicanes]

IF there's even a physical card (many new receivers don't have them - the chip is soldered to the mainboard) - it stays in the receiver it came with.

Darn. Is DireTV the same way, or will THEY let subscribers pay for one card and stick it into whichever box they feel like using at that moment?

I remember 3 or 4 years ago there was some company working on a system for high-end whole-house home theatre systems that used a dynamically-allocable pool of two satellite receivers as the equivalent of a PBX and let you watch any two channels on a basically unlimited number of TVs around the house. When someone in one room changed the channel, it would allocate an unused box from the pool or let you forcibly sieze one in a challenge/response type manner (displaying a warning on TVs viewing the box about to be siezed unless they hit a button on the remote to swat the siezure attempt down). It even went so far as to stick IR motion sensors in each room so it could determine whether anybody was actually watching a currently-allocated box if both were already allocated. Unfortunately, I think HDCP killed it dead (it was originally intended to use firewire-over-ethernet as its transport layer to keep the signal all-digital all the way to the TV. With HDCP, it could still dynamically allocate the two boxes among any two TVs in the house, but two or more TVs couldn't watch the same channel from the same box). I'll have to try searching for it later tonight to see what happened to it (I suspect it joined the legions of dotc0m dead, though).