DirecTV Lawsuit Over “HD-Lite” Goes to Court

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Thankfully it’s finally happened, the lawsuit that was filed against DirecTV in 2004 over the fact that the HD it broadcasts is so overly compressed that many folks refer to it as “HD-Lite” was allowed to go to court after a judge denied the DirecTV request for arbitration.

For those of you that have DirecTV and think it looks great, this probably won’t effect you, but for the folks that have DirecTV and have also seen OTA (Over The Air) HD before, you are probably tearing your hair out. An OTA HD broadcast uses around 19Mb/sec of bandwidth for the signal, while Cable TV (Comcast/Cox) is around 12Mb/sec, Dish Network is around 11-12Mb/sec and DirecTV broadcasts at around 8Mb/sec. You start to see that chopping the signal more than in half is allowing DirecTV to save money and broadcast more channels with less hardware. Anyone else think this has a lot to do with the fact that they paid $4 Billion for the exclusive NFL package and ended up boosting their Sunday Ticket prices to try and recoup that cost after they realized football wasn’t actually made out of gold?

If you aren’t a sports fanatic, I would encourage you to look at Dish Network’s HD lineup, namely the Premium American package, it’s something like $100/month, but that includes all 180 channels, every HD channel (I think like 20 or so), and something like 12 premium channels (HBO, Starz and Showtime IIRC). That is pretty reasonable considering that for my local Comcast, the price for a smaller package (less normal channels and less HD channels and no premium) is roughly $110/mo, if I add the same 3 premium channels, I’m looking at $150/160 month.

Thankfully, I only have limited basic, which is $12/mo because I don’t get locals where I am OTA.

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This post was written by:

Riyad Kalla - who has written 1613 posts on The “Break it Down” Blog.

Ultimately I just want to provide a resource that folks find useful.

3 Trackbacks For This Post

» My Impressions of the Mitsubishi WD-65831 Says:
September 23rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm

[...] Ok so the controversial topic of noise keeps coming up in AVS, and here’s the bottom line. You are going to see noise on ANY large/high-definition television that is processing a poor or overly compressed signal. This comes up in AVS a lot especially related to sports and fast-panning scenes, like a hockey game, football pass, or tennis. The problem is that not a lot of people realize just how over-compressed rebroadcast HD signals are from your providers (DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, etv.). OTA (Over the Air) HD and any HD from a media source like an HD-DVD or BluRay disk is going to be the best bet to see if the video processor in your TV actually has a problem with noise. In almost every single case where I’ve seen people complain about noise either in the Sony, Samsung or Mitsubishi thread, once they got a really strong source to play on their set, they noticed there was no noise. [...]

The “Break it Down” Blog » Blog Archive » World Declares Shenanigans on DirecTV’s “100 HD Channels” Claim Says:
March 29th, 2007 at 5:32 am

[...] have covered DirecTV’s lies about it’s “superior HD quality” and customer/competitor’s reactions to those claims. Now it seems that the true story [...]

My Impressions of the Mitsubishi WD-65831 | The "Break it Down" Blog Says:
March 30th, 2008 at 10:20 am

[...] like a hockey game, football pass, or tennis. The problem is that not a lot of people realize just how over-compressed rebroadcast HD signals are from your providers (DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, etv.). OTA (Over the Air) HD and any HD [...]

0 Comments For This Post

» My Impressions of the Mitsubishi WD-65831 Says:
September 23rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm
[...] Ok so the controversial topic of noise keeps coming up in AVS, and here’s the bottom line. You are going to see noise on ANY large/high-definition television that is processing a poor or overly compressed signal. This comes up in AVS a lot especially related to sports and fast-panning scenes, like a hockey game, football pass, or tennis. The problem is that not a lot of people realize just how over-compressed rebroadcast HD signals are from your providers (DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, etv.). OTA (Over the Air) HD and any HD from a media source like an HD-DVD or BluRay disk is going to be the best bet to see if the video processor in your TV actually has a problem with noise. In almost every single case where I’ve seen people complain about noise either in the Sony, Samsung or Mitsubishi thread, once they got a really strong source to play on their set, they noticed there was no noise. [...]
The “Break it Down” Blog » Blog Archive » World Declares Shenanigans on DirecTV’s “100 HD Channels” Claim Says:
March 29th, 2007 at 5:32 am
[...] have covered DirecTV’s lies about it’s “superior HD quality” and customer/competitor’s reactions to those claims. Now it seems that the true story [...]
My Impressions of the Mitsubishi WD-65831 | The "Break it Down" Blog Says:
March 30th, 2008 at 10:20 am
[...] like a hockey game, football pass, or tennis. The problem is that not a lot of people realize just how over-compressed rebroadcast HD signals are from your providers (DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, etv.). OTA (Over the Air) HD and any HD [...]

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