And think of the support nightmare this will be for D*.
Even if a user knows to only buy a Viiv PC, if he makes one silly change like replacing the NIC its not going to work. What's D* going to do to troubleshoot?Tell him to just buy a new PC?
There would only be no competition if they also bought all the cable companies and all the Telcos. If they raised prices after the merge people would just switch to either cable or (soon) their Telco.
You could make a good argument that they could better compete with cable by reducing their...
To be clear, the HR10-250 does send audio in 5.1 over the HDMI. As long as you have it connected to a reciever that can accept 5.1 it works great. I have mine connected via HDMI and only HDMI to a JVC RX-D402 and get 5.1.
Well, lets see on Feb 28th you pay $300 for a HD DVR and you OWN it forever. On March 1st you pay $300 for an HD DVR and D* OWNS it. That's a bit different.