Subscribers at DBSTalk.com, and I experienced a blank program guide with a date of 7/14 and all shows noted as "To Be Announced." While channels continued to receive programming, any recordings were disrupted.
Callers to DirecTV report they were told the problem was fixed or being fixed and they would not lose any programming. A hard reset (or reboot) seemed to fix the problem temporarily, but eventually the guide data would disappear again. However many ToDo lists were gone. One viewer reported he had paused a basketball game while putting his kids to bed and when he came back, the prompt for deleting an episode was on the screen and the end of the game was lost.
One enterprising user identified as dragonbait on DBSTalk.com seemed to have tracked down the problem to faulty guide data coming from one satellite.
"I just forced one of my HR20s to look at channels from 103 sat by recording 2 Starz channels; therefore, it should be getting guide and potentially date/time info from 119 sat. This box's date changed to 7/14 around 11:10.Similarly, I forced my other HR20 to get its guide data from the 101 sat by tuning it to XM channels. Its date did not change.
Therefore, it would seem that my suspicion that the 119 sat is sending the wrong date might be true. Further tests are needed to confirm."
No official posts from DirecTV had been made in the troubleshooting area of the DirecTV forums as of this posting.
(Credit:
Verizon)
We just finished a major update of our popular chart of HD programming compared and the new winner, in terms of national and local HD channels, by our count, is Fios TV. Bringing a hefty 83 such channels to bear in the New York City area, the fiber-optic-based TV service from Verizon comes out ahead of perennial satellite champions DirecTV (67 channels) and Dish Network (68) as of today.
The key here is our definition of "national and local." The big three all tout HD channel counts near or above the nice round number of 100 in their advertising campaigns, and by our count of "total channels," they all come more or less close enough, but we took a closer look at the channels themselves, and broke down national and local channels we consider important. That includes local broadcast channels like PBS (which neither satellite service offers), ABC and Fox, premium movie channels like HBO and Max (formerly Cinemax), and the myriad niche channels from ESPN to Mav TV to Palladia to World Fishing Network. We specifically exclude Regional Sports Networks, exclusive channels like Voom (which is only available on NY-area provider Cablevision), and duplicate feeds of premium movie channels, such as HBO (east) and HBO (west) carried by DirecTV and Fios.
Check out the updated HD programming compared chart.... Read more
The original DirecTV HD TiVo (above) is getting a long overdue sequel.
(Credit: CEA)DirecTV will release a new TiVo-powered high-def DVR in the second half of 2009, the company has announced. Unlike the last "DirecTiVo" model that was released in 2004, the new model will be able to receive DirecTV's entire lineup of digital and high-def channels.
DirecTV's original TiVo-powered DVRs were among the first satellite receivers with digital video recorders built in (rather than tethered external units). The HR10-250, in fact, was the first high-def DVR available anywhere. Unfortunately, two things happened that put that model on the fast track to obsolescence. DirecTV began utilizing MPEG-4 broadcasts for most of its HD channels--a format that wasn't compatible with the TiVo units. And secondly, the company introduced its own line of non-TiVo DVRs.
... Read more
Just a few weeks after Dish Network announced that it would offer 1080p on-demand movies, it looks like DirecTV is getting ready to match them. According to Scott Greczkowski's blog on Multichannel News, DirecTV is currently running a beta test that allows subscribers to download 1080p on-demand movies as well. Here's the relevant snippet:
I am not sure if the 1080p movie was coming from the satellite or if it was being downloaded over the internet. I do know that when I checked my DVR list the next morning the movie The Bucket List was there waiting for me. I quickly moved my HR-20 and hooked it up to my 1080p compatible Samsung TV in my bedroom and watched for a few moments. Again, the picture quality was amazing. I didn't have time to sit and watch this movie again (I saw this movies before, it was a great movie) but what I saw impressed me. There is no word from DirecTV when 1080p services will be rolled out to consumers, but from what I saw it worked and worked well.
We have to admit, we're a little skeptical that 1080p content from either provider is going to be responsible for a big increase in image quality. As others have said, resolution isn't nearly as important as the bit rate--Vudu and Apple TV technically sell HD movies at 720p resolution, but high-def aficionados can tell it's more like high-def lite. We've got a couple of HR-20s in CNET Labs, so we'll let you know if the 1080p on-demand content lives up to the hype, once its available on our boxes.
Voom's channels are no longer available on Dish Network.
(Credit: Voom.tv)
Just two days after it launched 22 relatively high-interest HD channels, Dish Network has stopped broadcasting the 15 specialty Voom HD channels. The channels, which Dish has long been interested in dropping to make way for more popular channels, include names like GamePlay HD, Treasure HD, Kung Fu HD, and Monsters HD, and programming most viewers have never heard of.
... Read more
SciFi HD is among the 22 new HD channels launched by Dish Network.
(Credit: CNET)Ever since DirecTV launched a slew of national high-definition channels last October and November, it's been the only place most Americans can get their Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi, and Bravo networks in high-def. On Monday, Dish network caught up somewhat, announcing the activation of a total of 22 new high-def channels, including those three and many other national, high-interest channels--as well as a few lower-interest ones, including World Fishing Network HD. Twenty of the channels are supposed to go live Monday, and the last two, the regional sports networks (RSNs) Comcast Sports Network Bay Area HD and Comcast Sports Network New England HD, will be activated Wednesday, according to the company. Check out the full list of new channels on the official press release.
... Read more
Updated 1:55 p.m. PDT with DirecTV's response.
DirecTV apparently had big trouble delivering ESPN2's coverage Tuesday morning of the season opener between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's, who are playing the game in Tokyo.
The number of reader comments to a 6:29 a.m. blog post about the outage by Amalie Benjamin, who covers the Red Sox for The Boston Globe, soared past 120 within a couple hours after the transmission failure began. The fans, naturally, are calling for congressional hearings on the matter.
While the problem seemed to have been remedied by 10 a.m. East Coast time, we were still waiting to hear from DirecTV about what exactly might have been the problem. It's probably no small comfort to Sox fans, though, that the team won 6-5 on a Manny Ramirez two-run double in the 10th.
DirecTV's response
In an e-mail, DirecTV's director of public relations, Robert Mercer, offered the company's apologies for the inconvenience, saying it was the result of "temporary technical difficulties" that did not affect the majority of channels and that have since been corrected.
In the case of the Red Sox game, any customers who have NESN or ESPN2 in HD were able to see the entire game. For customers who watch NESN in Standard Definition (SD), we were able to bring the channel back at the top of the seventh inning. For customers who watch ESPN2 in SD the channel came back on later, after the game was over.
Replays on both ESPN2 and NESN were planned for Tuesday afternoon Eastern time.
In my previous blog posts titled "Disappointed with DirecTV" (part 1, part 2) I described the problems I've had getting my DirecTV equipment upgraded for compatibility with the company's new MPEG-4 satellite broadcasts.
Today, I'll be reviewing the centerpiece of this upgrade: DirecTV's HR21-700 digital video recorder (DVR).
Since there's a great summary of the features of this product in this PDF from dbstalk.com, I won't try to rehash all the details. But I do want to describe my experiences using this gizmo, and compare it directly to my older HR10-250 TiVO DVR.
First, the "-700" in the model number is pretty much irrelevant. As I understand it, these numbers distinguish units made for DirecTV by different contract manufacturers. On the HR10-250, the "-250" part referred to the size of the hard disk. That certainly isn't true on the HR21-700, so don't be misled. According to that dbstalk.com review, the HR21-700 comes with a 320GB hard drive, but I suspect the particular model of hard disk may vary. I haven't opened mine up, and I don't know how to get the software user interface to tell me the size or type of hard disk inside.
On the outside, the HR21 is a handsome product. It has a nice "piano black" finish and appropriately dim blue LEDs on the front panel. I hate it when consumer electronics gizmos use bright LEDs, especially for home-theater applications; DirecTV got this right. The center control has a blue-lit ring around it, and the lighting appears to spin when the DVR is performing certain functions, like resuming play after a pause.
The remote control, on the other hand, is relatively colorful. The face is white and gray; the buttons are mostly white, black, and gray, with a bright-orange SELECT button in the center, an orange dot on the REC button, and a set of red, green, yellow, and blue buttons that serve various special functions in the user interface. It isn't as comfortable to handle or use as the HR10's TiVo "dogbone" remote, though, and I think it has more buttons than it really needs... three to turn things on or off, separate BACK and EXIT buttons, etc.
The user interface on the HR21 is a mix of good and bad. A lot of the features are just awkward-- odd mixes of hierarchical menus and commands associated with all those buttons on the remote. There are some very nice features, such as easy access to a list of the last several channels viewed-- the HR10 could pop back and forth between the current and last channel, but that was never quite good enough for me.
My disappointment with the HR21 comes from the major features it doesn't have. The biggest failing is the inability to assign the two tuners in the unit to different channels and flip back and forth between them. I used this feature all the time on the TiVo HR10, since it was so convenient. I could take advantage of commercial breaks or boring sections of one show to use the other tuner to look for other shows, pausing and resuming one channel or the other as I flicked back and forth.
The HR21 can record two shows, or record one channel while watching another, and it's possible to switch between the tuners in these modes, but it's much more awkward than the TiVo solution and in practical terms it isn't worth bothering with most of the time. Since this is one of the most attractive features of the HR10, and the HR21 has all the hardware needed to implement it, I can only assume that this feature was deliberately omitted by DirecTV. My guess-- and it's only a guess-- is that the feature is patented by TiVo. Of course, it seems to me that many of the features of the HR21 could be covered by TiVo patents, so I've often wondered if DirecTV got some kind of patent license from TiVo as part of the two companies' earlier cooperative development efforts. I just have no idea what the real situation is.
Another major missing feature is the lack of tuners for local digital TV broadcasts. The older HR20 had these, but the HR21 dropped them, presumably for cost reasons. DirecTV will soon introduce another gizmo called the AM21 that hooks up to the HR21 via USB and provides those missing digital TV receivers. It looks like this is probably how I'll get this capability back after DirecTV (or its local contract installer) screwed up this part of my upgrade, but since the AM21 isn't shipping yet, I can't get DirecTV to tell me for sure whether they'll be able to send me one.
Other features, such as slow-motion playback, are badly implemented. The slow-motion feature sometimes takes several seconds to engage, making it virtually impossible to play back a specific scene in slow motion. When it works, it's also not nearly slow enough. It's so bad that I've basically given up on this feature entirely, relying instead on the freeze-frame and frame-advance features, which work quite well-- even a little better than on the HR10. Similarly, skipping to the beginning or end of the recording buffer often doesn't work as documented.
One thing I find very strange is the way the HR21 implements multiple video formats. The HR10 was very limited in this respect; it can output in 480i (standard-def interlaced video), 480p, 720p, and 1080i (the major modes of digital TV broadcasts) but it gave no further control over letterboxing or stretching the video to help it display properly on the TV. The HR21 offers all of these extra capabilities, but most of them don't do anything useful. Sometimes the standard modes-- the ones that correspond to the basic modes in the HR10-- clip off parts of the active area of the TV program. This is very noticeable and irritating when captions are clipped off in commercials or news programs.
The other problem with the HR21 is that it's not very reliable. Although all the signal-strength measurements are very high, I get frequent video and audio errors. For a second or two, all or part of the screen will dissolve into green blocks and noise, or the audio will stutter. In some cases, I can be sure these errors are not caused by problems receiving the signal, because I can rewind five or ten seconds and the program plays through normally. Since it's playing the same bits the second time, any problems have to lie in the playback circuitry and software.
The HR21 has also recorded entire programs without an audio track. It doesn't help to stop and restart the playback; there's just no audio there as far as the HR21 can tell.
On the other hand, the HR21 hasn't yet rebooted spontaneously, as the HR10 used to do once every month or two. So that's good.
There are some other things I like about the HR21. For example, I record the local and network evening news programs and watch them when I get home. The HR21 is smart enough to treat these recordings as part of the live recording buffer, so as long as the unit is still tuned to the same channel, I can watch one program followed by the other without having to dip into the list of recorded programs.
That list is very well organized on the HR21, with similar programs being grouped together. The HR21's hierarchical list still has room for improvement, but it's better than the HR10's flat list.
The HR21 also makes it easier to select a program in the guide for recording one or all upcoming episodes. With four speeds, rewinding and fast-forwarding are more useful than on the HR10, and the HR21 matches a traditional TiVo feature: after fast-forwarding through commercials, hitting Play causes the unit to back up a few seconds so no part of the program is missed.
I've taken a lot of detailed notes about the behavior of the HR21, but I think I'll skip all of that for now and just deliver the bottom line: the HR21 has some nice features, but the key features it's missing, and the unreliability of basic functions like recording and playback that I've observed on my brand-new model, make it a less than satisfactory product.
I'll continue to accumulate notes on the HR21 and I'll probably post a follow-up in the next few months, especially as I gain experience with some of the unit's advanced features and I get that AM21 or some other way to restore local digital-TV broadcast capability.
I posted the general outline of my problems with a DirecTV upgrade a few days ago. Now for some of the details.
DirecTV logo
(Credit: DIRECTV, Inc.)When DirecTV called me in February to talk me into upgrading my hardware, I had three pieces of equipment in operation: a dish antenna configured to receive signals from DirecTV's three older satellites, an RCA DTC100 HD receiver in my bedroom, and a Hughes HR10-250 HD TiVo DVR (digital video recorder) in my living room.
DirecTV made a simple offer: if I simply said "yes," they'd send out a professional installer with a new dish, a new HD receiver (the H20 or H21 models capable of receiving the new MPEG-4 channels), and a new HD DVR (the HR20 or HR21 models).
I really didn't want to lose all the great features of my TiVo box, but I knew there'd be no choice; eventually I'd have to switch. So I said yes. I got an appointment for the next week-- February 28, as it happened. When I asked about the differences between the different models of receiver and DVR, the DirecTV representative said I could get the information on the Internet. He gave me the phone number of DirecTV's service department and encouraged me to call to verify the appointment and find out what equipment would be installed.
Over the next few days I looked into these model numbers for the receiver and DVR to see if there was any basis for choosing between them. It turns out the "21" models are newer but lack the internal tuners for local digital broadcasts. That was a problem for me, since I regularly watched these broadcasts on my HR10-250. So on Feb. 25, I called the number I was given and spoke with a Molisha. She verified the appointment schedule, and I asked if she could specify that I wanted to get the HR20 DVR instead of the HR21. She responded evasively, but eventually I got her to admit that she could do that.
On Feb. 28, the installer showed up... with a new antenna and an HR21-700 DVR. His work order didn't say anything about the HR20 (though I learned later that DirecTV's version of the service request did mention it), and it didn't mention the new receiver for the bedroom at all (though again DirecTV's records show this was part of the order).
The installer placed a call to his dispatcher to see if he could get an HR20 and went up to the roof to install the new dish. I asked him to leave the old dish in place, just in case, and he agreed. He eventually heard from his dispatcher that no new HR20 models were available, only customer returns, and he recommended I take the HR21 and work it out with DirecTV. That seemed reasonable, since DirecTV was going to have to send me the missing receiver anyway.
So the installer and I hooked up the HR21, he made the call to get it activated, and that was that.
But when I went up to the roof to check out the new antenna, I discovered that not only had the installer not left the old dish in place, he'd left it disassembled in multiple pieces. The big pieces were lying on the roof surrounded by some of the mounting hardware (bolts, nuts, washers, etc.). The other hardware had rolled down into my gutter. I think that's pretty awful.
I emailed DirecTV through its website once while the installer was at the house, and again afterward, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. But in reviewing my account information while researching this post, I discovered that DirecTV marked the Feb. 28 appointment as both "installed" and "cancelled" and entered a new order on March 10 that refers to installing a dish and relocating (not replacing) my existing receivers. Perhaps this means someone got my emails but completely misunderstood them.
I'll give them a call, and post here again when I find out what the company is able to do to rectify these problems. And I'll also be posting a review of the new HR21-700 DVR. The more I use it, the more I discover flaws and shortcomings relative to my trusty old TiVo. It isn't all bad; there are a few features of this unit that work pretty well. I'll cover them all, soon.
Constrained by the technical limitations of its satellite television service, DirecTV has watched from the sidelines as cable operators and phone companies' high-end TV services have rolled out increasingly popular video-on-demand features.
The company is now preparing to launch its own VOD service this spring, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Called DirecTV On Demand, the service, now offered in beta, is designed to deliver VOD content to customers in two ways: via automatic transmission of selected movie titles, which will be stored on subscribers' digital video recorders and then ordered up for viewing whenever the subscriber wants; and via Internet downloads of additional content, including TV shows, streamed to the subscriber's set-top box.
DirecTV also can track customer activity on its Internet-connected set-top boxes, the Journal report noted, and use the data to help it sell targeted ads.
DirecTV is expected to offer about 3,000 shows and movies, most of which will be delivered over the Net; the company will use the automatic transmission for exceptionally popular programs and movies. Comcast, meanwhile, says it offers about 10,000 pieces of VOD content, much of it for free; movies are available for about $5.
Whether DirecTV On Demand will measure up to alternatives offered by cable and Verizon Communications' Fios service is up for debate. Pricing will certainly be a factor, but so will the timeliness of DirecTV's VOD deliveries. If customers who order a movie or TV program for Net-based delivery to the set-top box have to wait too long for the content to download--and video does eat up a lot of bandwidth--they might be disinclined to use that option. Fios, a fiber-optic-to-the-home system, can deliver large video files in seconds.
Satellite television providers can't stand still, in any case, because cable and phone companies continue to ramp up their TV offerings.
DirecTV itself has been getting flack from subscribers unhappy with the company's drift away from the TiVo digital video recorders it once endorsed and its push toward sales of its own DVR, the HR21-700, which, some users say isn't as versatile as its TiVo counterpart.
Note, though, that use of DirecTV On Demand in beta (and, presumably, in the service's fully launched form) requires a DirecTV-brand high-definition DVR receiver--the HR20 or the HR21--and, of course, some form of broadband Internet service (minimum 750Kbps connection speed), which, of course, is available only through a cable provider or phone carrier. So you want DirecTV On Demand? Buy DirecTV's DVR receiver, and pay your cable/phone broadband bill.
In this environment, DirecTV has to do whatever it can to avoid losing market share.
