I'm afraid this has all just been a big misunderstanding. I just got off the phone with the senior tech on duty at Dish Network Advanced Tech Support. He explained that Voom doesn't want to broadcast in HD-Lite (actually, he didn't use the term, HD-Lite, since he was unfamiliar with the 1280x1080i format altogether), but they have to use a degraded format because, until just a couple years ago, "nothing was filmed in HDTV." (He repeated this statement at least 10 times during the course of our 15 minute conversation, so it must be true
.) When I explained to him that 35 mm film has a resolution of about 18 million pixels, with 70mm achieving more than 4x that, he modified his position slightly, explaining that the studios are supplying the films in digital form in lower resolutions, something Dish has no control over. I then asked him why HBO is sending the same film to Dish in 1080i, but to DirecTV in HD-Lite. He sputtered for a minute, then looped back to the beginning and explained that only the latest movies were filmed in HDTV. This loop continued until I ended the call. Could it be that Dish/Voom doesn't even know they accidentally kicked the HD-Lite switch on the console?