Team Summit General Assembly Notes

[ewindowman]

I though Al did win

[RedSavina]

It would seem to me that they would want to keep these new birds at or near the main 110/119 slots. IF the Dish500 can be used for 119/129, then E* could:

1) convert all content at 129 to MPEG4
2) move the bulk of SD to 110
3) remainder of SD and MPEG4 at 119

There are several assumptions with the above, but with a new bird at 129 the weak transponder issues go away. Parking the other one at 119 gives all the new MPEG4 goodness to 119/129 which should be the lesser issue for repointing customers. Legacy customers do not need to be repointed.

What this doesn't take into account are the spotbeam issues, capacity issues, etc. If those can be managed, it seems like E* has to work with 110/119/129 to implement this new plan at minimal cost to them (repoints, etc).

Now, all you technical gurus can point out the error of my ways for thinking this!

(please be gentle )

Red

[MikeD-C05]

The plan is to create a mirrored service for mpeg 4 and then transition everyone over to mpeg 4 receivers and then repoint the dishes or reissue the new 18" dish and lnb for the new mpeg 4 sat locations.

I imagine they will slowly start turning off the mpeg 2 customers by programming. First the mpeg 2 hd channels will go off . Then the premium movie customers will be upgraded and then they will cut off the basic programming . Somewhere in there they will have to upgrade all international customers unless they want to remain just international wing dish customers.

I think it would behoove DISH to cut down all receivers to just a few mpeg 4 ones and sell the old mpeg 2 receivers to their sister service in Canada : Expressvu. Since they use the same receivers that Dish uses and they just change the faceplate and model numbers and software. I also imagine that there will be a whole lot of sat dishes to replace over the next few years to be able to go all mpeg 4.

I hope that DISH plans to offer some great upgrades to get existing subs to upgrade and that they effectively COMMUNICATE to them about the pending changes or instead of retaining existing subs, they will be losing them due to the changes. This is as big a change as when Primestar was bought by Directv. There needs to be a lot of press either by mail inserts, dvr events downloaded to the hard drive , phone calls ,etc.

[mboron]

Too cool--Alaska HD locals! I never thought I would see that. Awesome.

[dfergie]

Too cool--Alaska HD locals! I never thought I would see that. Awesome.

Congrats! Alaska...

[Greg Bimson]

I think the addition of the Alaska and Hawaii HD markets has something to do with the law. I believe that both DirecTV and Dish Network must provide the digital locals and all of their digital subchannels to the non-contiguous states by June.

[dfergie]

Good point Greg.... but congrats to both still!

[Foxbat]

The two satellites for the new MPEG4 service are 10.5˚ apart. I could see Dish reusing a customer's Dish 500 or Dish 1000 with a new "Y" adapter with the proper spacing. I assume that Echostar owns all the transponder licenses for these two new locations?

[navychop]

RedSavina:

I doubt there are enough frequencies at 110/119 to do all that. If there were more available frequencies there, I imagine they would have put up more/bigger satellites already.

[Poke]

Yeah to early say how they will work things so we will all half to wait later in the year see how things go.