I am scheduled to get Dish at the new house on Friday. D* is fine, but it ain't all that
I think it is pretty well established that almost everyone is doing some kind of HD Lite. Some do it via horizontal resolution reductions, like Dish, Uverse, and DirecTV. Others do it by bit-starving the stream or turning up the compression to the point it really impacts the PQ. Some do multiple methods. It used to be that FiOS and Google Fiber TV didn't do these things, but I don't even know if that is true any more.
I wonder if
IcEWoLF is referring to compression artifacts in reference to "pixelation." Depending on the who reported it, they might not know the difference.