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. .
