Dish Offers Service in 1080p
PrintDISH network became the first satellite provider to offer video in a full 1080p or 1920x 1080 progressive resolution on August 1st. The first movie they are offering in 1080p is I Am Legend on their Video On Demand service. DISH will use 1080p in place of 1080i or 720p whenever the content is available. The upgrade in resolution won’t be available for everyone. It will however, be available at no additional cost for any subscriber who has an HD DVR.
DISH will also greatly expand the number of HD channels that it can carry to 150 by this fall.
With cable and satellite companies to begin offering content in the higher resolution 1080p format closes the distance between TV and physical media such as Blu-ray and leaves the competition from download services like Apple TV and Xbox 360 movie rentals out in the cold.
It remains to be seen just how high a resolution do we need to be able to enjoy our movies or TV in. Is 720p really so bad? Many people just cannot see any reason to throw out their old DVD player and movie collection in favor of the slightly sharper picture available on Blu-Ray. The slow adoption of Blu-ray reflects this trend. For truly wide spread adoption to take place rapidly, we will need to see Blu-ray undercut DVD prices across the board. VOD and download services moving to 1080p may only hinder Blu-ray’s already sluggish adoption rate.
Have you already jumped over to 1080p or plan to soon? Sound off and tell us what convinced you to make the switch.
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Vince Paske
August 04, 2008 at 2:46pm
OK, I have a Toshiba XA2 DVD player, which has one of the best upconverting chips available and DVD's do look pretty good on my 56" 1080p DLP.
But to say when I watch a Blu-Ray that the image is just "slightly sharper" would be completely false. The image is immensely sharper, the colors are much, much richer and the deep shades of blacks are light years above what a SD-DVD can produce. Lossless audio support is also noticeable better if you have the gear to pump it out.
VOD? Please, I want a hard copy for movies I want to own. I may rent using VOD, but then again, they'll probably use some for of compression to make downloading faster and I'm such a picky bastage it'd probably ruin it for me. To "own" a movie which is stored on a hard drive just feels tenuous to me. Ever have a hard drive fail?
I do agree that the price for BD has to come down before it really picks up steam, just like DVD's in the late nineties.
dbrown59
August 04, 2008 at 1:22pm
I got a newer 1080p Plasma last year and an up-convert to 1080p DVD player. Works really well. Bting a Blue ray DVD Player, not an option. But a PS3 sometime, maybe once the TV is paid off and guaranteed to be backwards compadible with the PS2 Games.
horzo
August 04, 2008 at 11:00am
Who buys movies?? Rent and return. I can count on the fingers of one the hand the number of movies i actually want to watch more than once or twice. I have very little investment in DVDs, and those few I do have work just fine in my BD player.
Upconverting players actually perform pretty well I've found, but I have to question the eyesight of anyone who has trouble seeing a big difference between an upconverted DVD and Blu-ray on a decent 1080p TV.
AndyYankee17
August 04, 2008 at 1:01pm
I'm sure there's a hell of alot people out there who can tell the difference between 640x480 and 1920x1080 resolutions.
FoamysKing
August 04, 2008 at 8:34am
i an mony others that i know live the picture quality but come on the price of a blue ray player is insane compaired to a normal dvd player any ways i alreday have an hd hdvd player and guess what the 100 dollar price point is what made the upgrade look attractive but 400 for a player no way
endee
August 04, 2008 at 8:00am
Anyone who's ever subscribe to the Dish Network service, I did for a number of years, knows that their picture quality can be horrible. When I last was a customer, Dish Network pay-for-view HD movies at 720p looked pretty good but nowhere near the eye-popping quality of their OTA counterparts. The reason? Dish Network significantly compressed the video stream to fit more channels into the relatively limited satellite bandwidth. Is there any reason to believe that Dish will treat 1080p any differently?
If the headline was
Dish Offers Service in loselessly-compressed 1080p
we would have a story!
AndyYankee17
August 04, 2008 at 9:43am
haha, I got 2 HD tv's one of them's connected to a SD source though, Dish SD SUCKS. I have a tivo connected to it and I thought it was tivo compressing it to nothing, no, Dish makes youtube look like a DVD.
Doesn't fios advertise uncompressed TV though?
dwr50
August 04, 2008 at 6:37am
I've spent a lot of money on DVD's. I won't be playing the upgrade game this time. Sorry Sony... you loose again.I'm not even buying a new TV or converter box. TV has become all about advertising instead of entertainment. Between my DVD's and my Wii my evenings are filled with entertainment instead of commercial interuptions.
Acer Aspire 5610z,Vista HP, No problems with Vista... so far, but I'm learning Linux, just in case.
Acer Aspire 5315-2153, $348 Walmart Special,Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Spring Edition,VirtualBox 1.6.0
teh1583
August 04, 2008 at 4:40am
One thing that pushed me to upgrade my old DVD player, aside from it crapping out... was the upconvert quality of the BluRay players. They seem to enhance standard def DVDs very well, not to BluRay quality mind you, but much better than even the "Upconvert" players do. I have been very fond of the new player, even though I have been a little more frugal with the purchase of new movies, picking only the ones I must have.
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