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Well, I signed up with Voom and it was installed on 03/24/05, and I knew that the future of Voom was in jeopardy. After enjoying a little over a month with Voom, and with Voom shutting down service, I went back to Comcast on 04/27/05. Here are my personal opinions of Voom:

HIGHS (Pointing out the best features of Voom)

(1) Quality - Although Comcast HD, and Dish Network HD is the only HD I can compare it to (I never had DirecTV HD), I would say that Voom was #1 in HD quality. I am sure it is because they were built from the ground up as being an HD service, and they cared about quality. Even their guide and menu options were in HD.

(2) Pricing - Voom again is #1 as far as comparitive pricing. If you were to subscribe to any other provider and get all the premium movie channels(HBO, Showtime, TMC, Stars, etc) you would be paying more than you would for Voom's Va Va Voom package for ~$89.95/month.

(3) Charles Dolan - You have to give this guy credit for coming up with the idea of an satellite service designed to be HD from the ground up. You also should appreciate the money he spent of his own to try to save Voom when it was in trouble, and even going against his son and getting rid of board members that opposed him. Voom was his baby, and he worked hard trying to save it. Unfortunately, it was too little too late in the end. My hat's off to you Charles.

LOWS (Pointing out things that needed more work)

(1) Voom21 Variety - While Voom21 is a great package and great channels, the think I disliked was the lack of variety on those channels. I don't know how frequently I checked the guide and saw the same things playing over and over on some of the channels, such as Flipper, Thunderbirds, etc. Not that the programs themselves were bad, they should have had a larger variety.

(2) Lack of SD channels - While Voom continued to add SD channels to the end, they did have quite a bit less SD channels than the other provider. This is a good and bad thing. Good, because other providers have alot of SD channels that really should not be on a channel, and bad, because the channels that most people wanted, they really didn't add till the end.

(3) Marketing - I think this was part of Voom's demise, was lack of marketing. As has been brought up before, Voom was only sold locally in Sears stores. When you go to buy great quality HD equipment, would Sears be on the top of your list of stores to buy it from? NO! They should have also sold in Home Theater stores, Best Buys, Circuit City's, Fry's......but any place but Sears. To really compare the quality, people should be able to walk into a store and view the quality, and Sears would not have the higher quality televisions to really show off Voom in all it's glory.

(4) Channel Structure - This has also been brought up, and this could be a good and bad thing. Voom only had two different packages, Voom (~$40)and Va Va Voom (~$90), while competitors has at least 3 packages you could choose from. Voom should have offered more packages and offered more variety and a la carte items. If I remember correctly, PlayboyHD was the only thing offered. Voom should have possibly offered a middle package priced at about $60.

(5) DVR & Archiving - although plans were made to have one, it never ended up being a reality. This would have been a great way for people to archive missed shows to record and watch for later. On another note that I will add on here, it would have been good to have a firewire port that was active on the box, to archive to a computer for later. This would have been great demo material for later, and, as of now, something to remember Voom by, but there was not a cheap way to record and save Voom programming.

I think I have mentioned the most important things. Don't get me wrong, I will very greatly miss Voom and the quality and pricing of it's service. It's a shame they are going out of business, and now Dish Network and DirecTV have no quality satellite competition, so they will probably not work as hard as they should if Voom had stayed in business and pulled customer away from them. I think most people are going to cable because of the inexpensive DVR options that matter to alot of people.

Voom, we love you and will miss you. Thanks for the memories, and the quality time we shared together. Hopefully, your programming will stay with us in some form or fashion.