Actually, he said more than that. He mumbles, but this is reasonably close:
Charles Ergen - CEO Dish Network on Charlie Chat
We did enter into an agreement with Cablevision on the "Voom" satellite to aquire that satellite at the 61 and 1/2 degree location. We already have a satellite there ourselves as well. We also aquired capacity there.
We did not aquire the Voom programing assets, they have about 21 channels of of high definition television - we did not aquire that, and they have indicated that they may continue to broadcast at a different location or something.
We have to wait until we get the FCC approval for the aquisition. That could take anywhere from three to six months, probably. But once we are approved for that it does give us a lot more capacity to do a lot more high definition television. We are looking for every way to be able to do that. That's kinda step number one.
The second thing for high definition television is that we have a new technology called MPEG-4 which is a different form of compression that actually doubles the amount of capacity of high definition television vs our current MPEG-2.
So one of the things that we want to wait on is to add a lot of channels in MPEG-4 so we don't have a lot of people to work with to upgrade to that new service.
So long story short is - (we should probably do this in a show and give more schedule about programming in HDTV but) - It's probably more of a fall type product when you will see more HDTV from Dish Network.
We certainly hope from a HDTV perspective that we have more HDTV than any cable company or any available satellite. We view it as the wave of the future, there are so many things with the DVR and the UHF remote controls and the two tuners in a box we have been a leader, and we will also be a leader in HDTV.
Stand by to more Charlie Chats, and (we won't get into a lot of details here but) we're going to wait on new satellites that we have in process, we have to wait on MPEG-4 technology which is a technology we are testing today - but the product isn't out until late this fall.
Jim interjects: "And that's how it relates to any real volume of HD programming, is there a chance that we will have anything before the fall?
We may add a few channels before this fall - The industry is still evolving, I saw where Starz! is going to take down their HDTV movie channel "Encore" - I don't believe we put that one up, now they are going to take it down - so we didn't confuse people with that. There are a lot of people who are going to enter the HDTV programming business, a lot of it is going to be late this year - a lot of it next year.
I can only say that if you like HDTV and you are a Dish Network subscriber I think that you are going to like a lot of the things that we do. We put those plans in place to be able to do that. We are just not ready to announce every single thing we are going to do there until we are ready. There will probably be a Charlie Chat several months from now when we do that.
"Late Fall" fits nicely into the timeline of getting E10 to 110 opening up more transponders for HD there, AMC-15 finally to 105 where HD can go if needed, and Rainbow1 cleared for East Coast HD (E1 and E2 providing West Coast HD).
JL
