What Has Been Dish Network's Best & Worst moments for the past Decade?

[dfergie]

What are your thoughts on Dish Networks Best or Worst Moments of the past decade as we move out of this decade?
Dvr's
External Archiving?
The tivo suit?
Loss of Distants?

 

[stardust3]

I thought it was a very good move when Dish took a stance with Lifetime & pulled them when they wanted a huge fee increase.

 

[tlee]

My worst

As a 6 year customer, I still miss VOOM.

 

[gopherscot]

Dropping Voom was a tough move for me ... I was a big fan of Rave, Equator and Monsters HD.

 

[whatchel1]

Best & Worse

The Best HD DVR the worse is the loss of Voom and the lawsuit that has follow. One tha is in both columns is the Tivo lawsuit. Best in that they are not giving in to them since Tivo really needs to be stopped from suing everyone that has a competing product. Worse if they loose and we get stuck with the bill.

 

[KAB]

Best

Standing up to the local affiliate owners trying to extort money to make up for their own losses.

 

[NotMe546]

No longer offering Absolute, I'm glad I got it.

 

[TNGTony]

As a 6 year customer, I still miss VOOM.

Ditto. The way Dish dropped Voom was one of its worst moments of all time! I still miss Monsters, FilmFest/VoomMovies, KungFu and a couple of others.

See ya
Tony

 

[TheKrell]

Agree on the loss of Voom. 2nd worst moment was the release of the TR-40 as the DTVpal accompanied by a surprise $20 price increase during the 1st shipment.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Charging a dvr fee PER DVR RECEIVER is definitely one of the WORST things DISH has done this decade. This lead to a slow & decline in DISH sub growth when people considered DIRECTV charged one dvr per account. Now depending on how they charge & or credit for the additional dvrs come February , will determine whether this will outrank the #1 thing I have listed.*

1) The best thing they have ever done is the VIP series of dvrs with dual outputs , all outputs active in hd and sd , and last but not least: NAME BASED RECORDING software.:up:up:up

2)Archiving to external hard drives was also a great customer feature- expanding your hard drive space. This meant you didn't have to delete programs you haven't watched over hard drive space filling up. Being able to turn a single solo receiver into a dvr like the 211/211k with external hard drive support. Cool meant a way around the extra or the single DVR fee. All cool customer rich features.

3) Adding a great majority of the locals in the country in HD and SD using spotbeams : a major feat when you consider that DISH lead the way in the industry being the first to push for locals and moving away from just distant neworks for network coverage. ( of course not being able to do distants legally helped push some of this locals expansion) Having a city's locals for news and weather is essential to be able to compete with cable & telecos.

4) Coming up with MPEG 4 compression technology that allows more hd channels on the same transponder( 7 - 8 at present) without loss of picture quality- a major technological feat. Look at your hd locals in just about every city carried by DISH, there is very little or no difference in the pq. Most can't really tell the difference in whether they are watching ota vs sat delivered by DISH. Sd channels also look better carried in mpeg 4 . This will allow major bandwith expansion without launching any more satellites. They will have to overcome the mpeg 2 receivers and replace them all with mpeg 4 hd receivers ,but once they do this , they can turn western arc to full mpeg 4 as well . Means more room for more hd channels .


* Remember technically the decade isn't over till 2011 starts 1/1/11. There was no year 0 when they started over the calender and year in A.D. .

 

[whatchel1]

4) Coming up with MPEG 4 compression technology that allows more hd channels on the same transponder( 7 - 8 at present) without loss of picture quality- a major technological feat. Look at your hd locals in just about every city carried by DISH, there is very little or no difference in the pq. Most can't really tell the difference in whether they are watching ota vs sat delivered by DISH. Sd channels also look better carried in mpeg 4 . This will allow major bandwith expansion without launching any more satellites. They will have to overcome the mpeg 2 receivers and replace them all with mpeg 4 hd receivers ,but once they do this , they can turn western arc to full mpeg 4 as well . Means more room for more hd channels .


* Remember technically the decade isn't over till 2011 starts 1/1/11. There was no year 0 when they started over the calender and year in A.D. .

Yeah someone else that know when a decade really starts & ends. Year 0 doesn't count people. Once they get rid of the MPEG 2 then they could get more bandwidth by only running HD no more SD to hog bandwidth too.

 

[yooper.mi]

`Loss of distant networks was a pain in the a__ for me

 

[lern4483]

Without hesitation-Voom takedown

As a 6 year customer, I still miss VOOM.

Yes, in my opinnion dish networks worst move ever-Takedown of the Voom channels
in one swoop.
That was a horrible thing to do.

The number one reason I had returned to dish was because of Voom back in 2004Spent the extra bucks to be able to get 61.5

I sorely miss Vooms unique programming. There is absolutely nothing like it on any provider.

Channels most missed:
Monster
Rave
Voom movies
Equator

 

[peano]

Signal integrity. Almost a full ten years of a compromised encryption system cost them (and us) millions and millions.

It looks like they finally solved the problem this year.

 

[ScottChez]

In the Past 10 years the biggest was (but is now fixed) . . .

Dishnetwork lost the HD war with DirecTV for about 1 1/2 years. Many were signing up with DirecTV and not Dish as the DirecTV TV comercials made it sound like they had DOUBLE the HD channels.
Loosing Voom did not help things, but was only small part in the HD channel count looking back.

Now that Dish seems ahead or tied people are coming back.

Looking at there quarterly earnings reports this cost them a lot of Subs compared to the DirecTV earning reports on new subs.

Again this is all in the past now.

 

[Islandguy43]

The best; is the 722 DVR.

The worst, is not making YES and MSG HD Channels available to almost 20 million people whom live in NY, Conn and NJ, and basically forcing us to go to cable.

 

[ehren]

4) bunk when it comes to PQ, it has looked worse since they only did 5 to 6 per tp mpeg4. Get back to me when they have 4 per tp which I believe would be equal to when Dish first went to 8psk for the 6000 model and 2 hd per tp with mpeg 2

 

[ehren]

Signal integrity. Almost a full ten years of a compromised encryption system cost them (and us) millions and millions.

It looks like they finally solved the problem this year.

More bunk, Dish has been cheaper than directv and cable for years.

Cable and Directv have been secure for a few years now and they are still more.

 

[grb]

From a personal point of view:

The best -- acquiring the Voom channels (that's actually why I switched to Dish).

The worst -- discontinuing the Voom channels (that's why I am considering leaving Dish).
honorable mention -- no MLB channel. We have a gay channel but no baseball channel. Go figure...

 

[MikeD-C05]

From a personal point of view:

The best -- acquiring the Voom channels (that's actually why I switched to Dish).

The worst -- discontinuing the Voom channels (that's why I am considering leaving Dish).
honorable mention -- no MLB channel. We have a gay channel but no baseball channel. Go figure...

Gained RuPaul but lost baseball. Oh it seems like a good trade .

YOU BETTER WORK!!