New Member & Reasons for Joinng
Greetings Members,
While I've been in the CE business for over 30 years, choosing my upgrade for TV has been a difficult choice for me. I have NOT yet read ANY posts or threads here but thought I'd state my position in case anyone has any feedback. I've been on the verge of upgrading my TV service with someone for about a year now. We have basic Comcast and I've actually been getting QUAM broadcast HDTV feeds of all the networks and more through Comcast on our one HDTV with a Quam tuner.
I also have a roof antenna and am getting the broadcast stations fed to my HD DVR to record programs in HD off-air.
Interestingly, I've also been getting an SDTV feed of Flix and TMC (4:3, not HD, just digital and clear) on the Comcast feed as well as a few additional SDTV channels.
So I keep doing a comparison of the four available services and try to decide because I really want to get ESPN in HDTV. I was going to do it for basketball season but it turned out all the Carolina games (most of them) were on Raycom and were on "The CW" or channel 54 out of Baltimore (20 from Washington) so I was able to record and watch them on 54.1 broadcast to my HD DVR.
I think I would like to switch to Verizon because they have the "potential" to have the best, uncompressed HDTV picture using fiber-optic to the house. I have been stopped because of horror stories of dealing with them, and because I would have to get a $5/month box for every standard TV (4+) and my Tivo's (2) plus a $10/month box for my TV and my DVR. The other reason to choose to upgrade Comcast is that it is the only one where we retain the ability to freely distribute standard NTSC TV around the house for free for as long as they keep sending those signals down the cable and only need boxes or cablecards for the HDTV devices.
I always liked DirecTV when we had it. It had the best picture and by far the best sound in the old pre-HD days. I'm not sure that is true anymore. I do think that they have the potential to be the only one to perhaps get me Formula One racing in HD as they are going to have the most HDTV channels. I would go back except you are back into the box on every TV and unable to distribute. I've also seen them on other's TV's and the image appears to really suffer on many channels due to huge compression. There is also the MPEG2 to MPEG4 switch that I was waiting for.
DISH is similar, I've always felt somewhat second rate to DirecTV. With both of them they require you to buy a HD-DVR that works with their service so that also stopped that switch.
My wife wants to go back to Tivo for HD. We have lived with both "real" Tivo for many, many years and then got to experience a "regular" DVR which uses a generic program guide. The DVR totally sucks. It sucks so bad it is almost amazing compared to how smart and perfect the Tivo service is. So to go to Tivo HD you can ONLY use a cable service so we would be staying with Comcast and we have to buy the unit, which is several hundred dollars, and we have to pay them for the service at $13/mo.
The two Tivo's we have had for many years were obtained when I worked at Sony and they gave us a permanent, lifetime subscription for the Tivo service. We have been lucky because many others have since died and one of ours has lost some picture quality but the other one has still been working perfectly for all these many years and it gets more use than any other single device in our lives.
So, no decision, no action, continued evaluations. If anyone actually added an HD feed for Speed Channel and Formula One was broadcast in HD, I'd buy THAT service in a heartbeat, but, alas, nobody does. Actually, FOX owns Speed and ran four races last year on delay on Fox in HD (Canada, Monaco, US, etc) and who knows if they will do it again. The interest in F1 in the US is pretty much like sailing, rugby and soccer!
Now that I have a manufacturing company and travel all of the US working with custom install dealers showing them how to offer customized home theater interiors to their clients, I really need a lot of HD recording capability via DVR where I can catch up when I'm home on weekends.
Every time I do the actual comparison of cost, it is amazing how no matter what their ads say, when you actually figure out your desired program needs (Speed, Versus, Golf, etc. for me) that every service is about $75 a month give or take $10, so it is a lot to pay for someone who only watches selected TV and doesn't have time to live in front of TV. I would actually can all of it except for the desire to watch F1, early rounds of the golf majors and Carolina basketball along with my addiction to Jon Stewart and Keith Olberman as my desired news and entertainment sources.
Looking forward to keeping up with the status of where sat programming is now in making my decision.
Best Regards,
Stuart Lamb - President/Founder
@Home Theater Rooms, Inc.
@Home Theater Rooms for Upscale Residences - Home