Yesterday, I spent about two hours giving Dish the boot. I pulled down the two-LNB Dish 500 dish and replaced it with a so-called “phase III” DirecTV dish. That was easy; it actually took me about 15 minutes to hang and align the dish to receive good signals from all three satellites. Then I spent the next 45 minutes (no kidding) on the phone with DirecTV, activating my two receivers. There’s a Philips DSX40 TiVo in the living room and a generic Philips DSX5500 down in the basement. Why the basement? Well, since it’s connected to the old TiVo, the new receiver can feed a signal to the bedroom TV or to my flat-panel, which faces the treadmill. Voila! Instant treadmill entertainment. What do I like and dislike so far?
Well, having an integrated TiVo and satellite receiver is wonderful. The program guide data comes via satellite, but it takes up to two days to download completely– that means I have a bunch of season passes with “no upcoming episodes” shown. Picture quality is good, and we get a few channels that Dish doesn’t offer– notably PBS Kids. On the minus side, I now have to relearn all the channel numbers; we’re missing a few stations (notably KTLA), and I can’t tape anything on the networks because there’s no off-air MPEG encoder. That’s why old faithful is downstairs; until the HD Tivo appears, we’ll have to watch network shows either live, in HD, or in the bedroom. I think that’s a fair trade.
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