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And the Medal Goes To...
August 22, 2008

Both DirecTV and Dish Network went above and beyond to bring their customers the 2008 Summer Olympics from Beijing.  And as we are starting to see things wind down in Beijing I thought I would give my own medal to the satellite companies for their coverage of this years Olympic games.

The Gold Medal goes to DirecTV for their superior coverage of this years event. Everything on DirecTV was well laid out, well planed and well executed. It was like the Olympics were made for DirecTV.

In the VOD category, DirecTV offered customers a dedicated VOD channel for the Olympics (channel 1008)  this VOD channel was nicely sorted by categories (Best of the Day, HD Daily Replay, etc.) which made it easier for home viewers to find what they were looking for.

Dish Network however had a lot of VOD coverage but it was all over the place and hard to find what you were looking for.  Some of the VOD was listed under “TV Entertainment” and a lot more VOD was available from their DishONLINE service. I must give Dish kudos for the first time ever making free high definition VOD available to customers, and the quality of the HD VOD was amazingly crisp and clear.

In the interactive category once again DirecTV shined, when there was interactive available you could access it just by pressing the red button on your remove.  All of the interactive applications were quick to load and easy to use.  I wish I could say the same about Dish Networks Interactive which was very slow to load (it took 30 seconds to load the Medal Counts) and Dish Networks graphics and layout was just lifeless.  I actually felt lonely while using Dish Networks interactive applications.

DirecTV also shined with extra content,  I was able to watch the games in Chinese and Korean with special feeds.  These feeds were also on Dish Network but were only available to those with Chinese or Korean programming packages.  My wife is Korean and she enjoyed watching some of the games in Korean. Both Dish and DirecTV offered Basketball and Soccer on their own dedicated HD channels and both looked great!

So while both companies offered the Olympics, DirecTV really shined in the way they presented them. Dish’s coverage did not seem well laid out, planned or organized. But I was very impressed to see that Dish could deliver in the HD VOD realm and I am hoping lots of consumers used this free feature in hopes that the folks at Dish Network will wake up and take notice that if they give us some good content that we will indeed use it. They need to understand that not everything shuld have a price tag attached to it, that free VOD programs like this will make a customer more “sticky.”  Dish also needs to do a major revamp to its interactive applications, 30 seconds to look at the Medal counts is just too long in my book!

Ao there you have it, DirecTV takes the gold and Dish Network takes the silver!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted by Scott Greczkowski on August 22, 2008 | Comments (4)