My impressions of the Dish press conference / CES display

[jcrandall]

I'm finally taking a break from walking the show floor.

Here are my impressions with what I say from Dish including their press conference:

1. I like their products for the DTV transition, the 40 & 50 STB from Echostar. But - they will screw it up. They made no reference to getting the 40 ($39 box) in retail - for this to be successful they need to get them in chain stores and get their name out there. The 50 box (OTA DVR) is a great piece of hardware for people that don't do satellite/cable. But - they will screw up the marketing. They have no price / monthly service cost plans yet. If they released this at $150-$199 with no service fees - it would be a big competitor to Tivo and the DVD Recorders with hard drives. It has a 250gb hard drive, and is full featured DVR including HDMI & Optical outputs. I'll post pictures & stuff tonight.

2. The 612 is a nice option, if at a lower price. Still dual tuner - but without the TV2 option. Meets the need of customers that don't use the dual output and SHOULD cost less. Can we say FREE HD-DVR

3. The DVR capabilities in 211 / 222 SHOULD be close to release - as they were working very well on their demo setup. Looked much better than when they showed it last. No word on exact timeline or cost. I would assume it will just be a $6 monthly DVR fee.

4. Sling is noticably part of dish - but no integration setups yet. Look for this in 2009 They did say Sling would remain a seperate offering, not going to become part of E* STB only.

5. Much less to promote or announce than last year. The whole setup seemed simple and didn't have much going on.

6. - Last one - and this will probally never happen...They displayed a 722 DVR uploading shows to a Blueray player, and to a laptop, using a software solution they are working on.
This is MRV on steriods!!! It is designed for home network only. The engineer I spoke with about it (from the UK BTW) said the video is sent to the other device in native format right from the satellite (mpeg 2 or 4). The end device is decoding it. It uploads through the ethernet port while still airing programming like ususal.


I'm sure the content protection will be an issue with the one.

Look for this in 2010, if we're lucky

Scott & Bob took footage of this - and will have an interview uploaded in the next few days!

I'll upload pictures tonight from the hotel (around 1am EST) - Anything that isn't already posted from the other guys

Tommorrow morning I'll get much more from Sling as well.

[dfergie]

Thanks for your take... 6. would be interesting but as you state content protection will probably never let that come about...

[HokieEngineer]

Couple of details about #6. It was a 222 that was streaming content via ethernet to other devices, using RTP. Supposedly there are content protection flags set so that the stream is not recordable. I hope to play with the demo on the show floor some more.

They had VLC running on a laptop pointed to a RTP stream coming from the ViP222. They also had an interactive app on a bluray player that was streaming video from the 222 as well.

I'm surprised this made the show floor, but it really was cool. Its barely a beta, more like a concept test. I attached some pics of the demo.

[jcrandall]

very cool concept indeed. thanks for correcting my error on receiver, they all look the same to me..

like I said, if WE are lucky, THEY will be able to do this in a couple years.

[BFG]

dang that's sweet

[J3ff]

Couple of details about #6. It was a 222 that was streaming content via ethernet to other devices, using RTP. Supposedly there are content protection flags set so that the stream is not recordable. I hope to play with the demo on the show floor some more.

They had VLC running on a laptop pointed to a RTP stream coming from the ViP222. They also had an interactive app on a bluray player that was streaming video from the 222 as well.

I'm surprised this made the show floor, but it really was cool. Its barely a beta, more like a concept test. I attached some pics of the demo.

Isn't this what slingbox already does?

I'm sitting here 10 miles away watching my 722 at home right now..

[jcrandall]

slingbox is not full 1080i HD with no compression

This uses the home network to give excellent quality. They had the demo running a plasma screen off a blueray player, really something if they can get it out to the customer.

[digiblur]

Couple of details about #6. It was a 222 that was streaming content via ethernet to other devices, using RTP. Supposedly there are content protection flags set so that the stream is not recordable. I hope to play with the demo on the show floor some more.

They had VLC running on a laptop pointed to a RTP stream coming from the ViP222. They also had an interactive app on a bluray player that was streaming video from the 222 as well.

I'm surprised this made the show floor, but it really was cool. Its barely a beta, more like a concept test. I attached some pics of the demo.

Reminds me of TSReader Was VLC watching MPEG4 content?

[digiblur]

I'm finally taking a break from walking the show floor.

Here are my impressions with what I say from Dish including their press conference:

1. I like their products for the DTV transition, the 40 & 50 STB from Echostar. But - they will screw it up. They made no reference to getting the 40 ($39 box) in retail - for this to be successful they need to get them in chain stores and get their name out there. The 50 box (OTA DVR) is a great piece of hardware for people that don't do satellite/cable. But - they will screw up the marketing. They have no price / monthly service cost plans yet. If they released this at $150-$199 with no service fees - it would be a big competitor to Tivo and the DVD Recorders with hard drives. It has a 250gb hard drive, and is full featured DVR including HDMI & Optical outputs. I'll post pictures & stuff tonight.

Thanks for the follow-up! They would have an awesome box if they allowed people to pull content from the OTA 50 box, upgrade the hard drives, attach other hard drives, or whatever. I don't see the issue with the protection here as OTA tuners for PC's are a dime a dozen. This would be an instant hit in the HD community!

[HokieEngineer]

Reminds me of TSReader Was VLC watching MPEG4 content?

I asked about mpeg4, and he attempted to stream one channel, and of course vlc locked up. He had to reboot the 222 to get it to work again. I'm hoping I can convince them to let me hook my laptop up and see if MPC with coreavc will connect to their feed.