Notes and impressions:
According to the DishONLINE Download List screen, The Beast is coming down at 1.04 Mbs and says 99% done. (as far as I can tell, there is about 20 seconds of credits either missing or still to be DL'd)
As luck would have it, I recorded The Beast this week and watched it (and deleted it
) last night just before I came here and read Scott's announcement about it being available through DishONLINE.
I have a Sony KDS-55A2020 SXRD RPTV that I, sadly, discovered would
not do 1080p/24 when the Turbo HD first arrived, so I have not watched any of the 1080p PPV options.
Since
this 1080p was FREE, I said, "What the hell" and DL'd it.
It did not do a test to see if my TV could do 1080p but just went ahead and started. A push of the Sony's Display button showed a 1080i resolution.
Though it was last night since I watched it, I must say that the resolution was demonstrably superior to what I remember from the version I recorded off of A&E HD.
This appeared much sharper and better color saturated (even for a show done with much gray-sky & snow shoots and gloomy night scenes). You could also better see the 'grain' that the cinematographer imposed (chose) and the presentation was much more apparent that it was film based and not video.
The biggest improvement seemed to be the contrast...especially the dark scenes.
There were details in the shadows that were crushed into total black the night before.
My take is that I was watching a full 1080i presentation at the limits of what can be broadcast (and what we
wished would be narrowcasted for ALL our Dish HD channels)
The two disappointments:
1) It was not Dolby Digital (Pro-Logic only )
2) The Closed Captioning did not show as it had on the 'regular' recording.
All in all.....I was
very pleased and hope they do much more of this.