First off... Everything you read here should be considered a RUMOR until you see it yourself... And I think you are going to like what you see.
Second... this information is made up of not only information I found out myself through my contacts but is also made up from information that other staff members have found and reported in our staff area. The information has been compiled together (and a lot of it matches from all of our sources)
So here we go...
It appears the new channels may not appear until Tuesday or Wednesday. While there could be a chance they could go up earlier, it is doubtfull as they need to prep for the NFL Ticket on Sunday which takes a lot of work to put on.
We should see anywhere from 10 to 25 HD channels next week. With TBS HD and CNN HD being the first ones available. Additionaly channels will be rolled out through the month of October.
Say GOODBYE to HDLITE on DirecTV, we are hearing full resolution on all the new MPEG4 channels! All channels will be using VBR (variable bit rate) encoding. In addition DirecTV is only putting 4 MPEG4 channels per transponder (Dish Network does 6 per transponder at 1440x1080) DirecTV will be doing 4 per transponder at 1920x1080. (The 720p channels will be at full resolution which is 1280x720)
It is expected that current MPEG2 HD channels will be available in MPEG4, for the MPEG4 versions of the channels users must tune to the SD channel number for that channel and the MPEG4 version will automatically be tuned.
And there you have it. Remember until you see it for yourself then consider this just a rumor.